How the Hunt Brothers Cornered the Silver Market and Then Lost it All

TL:DR: yes its long. Grab a beer.

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Until his dying day in 2014, Nelson Bunker Hunt, who had once been the world’s wealthiest man, denied that he and his brother plotted to corner the global silver market.
Sure, back in 1980, Bunker, his younger brother Herbert, and other members of the Hunt clan owned roughly two-thirds of all the privately held silver on earth. But the historic stockpiling of bullion hadn’t been a ploy to manipulate the market, they and their sizable legal team would insist in the following years. Instead, it was a strategy to hedge against the voracious inflation of the 1970s—a monumental bet against the U.S. dollar.
Whatever the motive, it was a bet that went historically sour. The debt-fueled boom and bust of the global silver market not only decimated the Hunt fortune, but threatened to take down the U.S. financial system.
The panic of “Silver Thursday” took place over 35 years ago, but it still raises questions about the nature of financial manipulation. While many view the Hunt brothers as members of a long succession of white collar crooks, from Charles Ponzi to Bernie Madoff, others see the endearingly eccentric Texans as the victims of overstepping regulators and vindictive insiders who couldn’t stand the thought of being played by a couple of southern yokels.
In either case, the story of the Hunt brothers just goes to show how difficult it can be to distinguish illegal market manipulation from the old fashioned wheeling and dealing that make our markets work.
The Real-Life Ewings
Whatever their foibles, the Hunts make for an interesting cast of characters. Evidently CBS thought so; the family is rumored to be the basis for the Ewings, the fictional Texas oil dynasty of Dallas fame.
Sitting at the top of the family tree was H.L. Hunt, a man who allegedly purchased his first oil field with poker winnings and made a fortune drilling in east Texas. H.L. was a well-known oddball to boot, and his sons inherited many of their father’s quirks.
For one, there was the stinginess. Despite being the richest man on earth in the 1960s, Bunker Hunt (who went by his middle name), along with his younger brothers Herbert (first name William) and Lamar, cultivated an image as unpretentious good old boys. They drove old Cadillacs, flew coach, and when they eventually went to trial in New York City in 1988, they took the subway. As one Texas editor was quoted in the New York Times, Bunker Hunt was “the kind of guy who orders chicken-fried steak and Jello-O, spills some on his tie, and then goes out and buys all the silver in the world.”
Cheap suits aside, the Hunts were not without their ostentation. At the end of the 1970s, Bunker boasted a stable of over 500 horses and his little brother Lamar owned the Kansas City Chiefs. All six children of H.L.’s first marriage (the patriarch of the Hunt family had fifteen children by three women before he died in 1974) lived on estates befitting the scions of a Texas billionaire. These lifestyles were financed by trusts, but also risky investments in oil, real estate, and a host of commodities including sugar beets, soybeans, and, before long, silver.
The Hunt brothers also inherited their father’s political inclinations. A zealous anti-Communist, Bunker Hunt bankrolled conservative causes and was a prominent member of the John Birch Society, a group whose founder once speculated that Dwight Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent” of Soviet conspiracy. In November of 1963, Hunt sponsored a particularly ill-timed political campaign, which distributed pamphlets around Dallas condemning President Kennedy for alleged slights against the Constitution on the day that he was assassinated. JFK conspiracy theorists have been obsessed with Hunt ever since.
In fact, it was the Hunt brand of politics that partially explains what led Bunker and Herbert to start buying silver in 1973.
Hard Money
The 1970s were not kind to the U.S. dollar.
Years of wartime spending and unresponsive monetary policy pushed inflation upward throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. Then, in October of 1973, war broke out in the Middle East and an oil embargo was declared against the United States. Inflation jumped above 10%. It would stay high throughout the decade, peaking in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution at an annual average of 13.5% in 1980.
Over the same period of time, the global monetary system underwent a historic transformation. Since the first Roosevelt administration, the U.S. dollar had been pegged to the value of gold at a predictable rate of $35 per ounce. But in 1971, President Nixon, responding to inflationary pressures, suspended that relationship. For the first time in modern history, the paper dollar did not represent some fixed amount of tangible, precious metal sitting in a vault somewhere.
For conservative commodity traders like the Hunts, who blamed government spending for inflation and held grave reservations about the viability of fiat currency, the perceived stability of precious metal offered a financial safe harbor. It was illegal to trade gold in the early 1970s, so the Hunts turned to the next best thing.
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Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; chart by Priceonomics

As an investment, there was a lot to like about silver. The Hunts were not alone in fleeing to bullion amid all the inflation and geopolitical turbulence, so the price was ticking up. Plus, light-sensitive silver halide is a key component of photographic film. With the growth of the consumer photography market, new production from mines struggled to keep up with demand.
And so, in 1973, Bunker and Herbert bought over 35 million ounces of silver, most of which they flew to Switzerland in specifically designed airplanes guarded by armed Texas ranch hands. According to one source, the Hunt’s purchases were big enough to move the global market.
But silver was not the Hunts' only speculative venture in the 1970s. Nor was it the only one that got them into trouble with regulators.
Soy Before Silver
In 1977, the price of soybeans was rising fast. Trade restrictions on Brazil and growing demand from China made the legume a hot commodity, and both Bunker and Herbert decided to enter the futures market in April of that year.
A future is an agreement to buy or sell some quantity of a commodity at an agreed upon price at a later date. If someone contracts to buy soybeans in the future (they are said to take the “long” position), they will benefit if the price of soybeans rise, since they have locked in the lower price ahead of time. Likewise, if someone contracts to sell (that’s called the “short” position), they benefit if the price falls, since they have locked in the old, higher price.
While futures contracts can be used by soybean farmers and soy milk producers to guard against price swings, most futures are traded by people who wouldn’t necessarily know tofu from cream cheese. As a de facto insurance contract against market volatility, futures can be used to hedge other investments or simply to gamble on prices going up (by going long) or down (by going short).
When the Hunts decided to go long in the soybean futures market, they went very, very long. Between Bunker, Herbert, and the accounts of five of their children, the Hunts collectively purchased the right to buy one-third of the entire autumn soybean harvest of the United States.
To some, it appeared as if the Hunts were attempting to corner the soybean market.
In its simplest version, a corner occurs when someone buys up all (or at least, most) of the available quantity of a commodity. This creates an artificial shortage, which drives up the price, and allows the market manipulator to sell some of his stockpile at a higher profit.
Futures markets introduce some additional complexity to the cornerer’s scheme. Recall that when a trader takes a short position on a contract, he or she is pledging to sell a certain amount of product to the holder of the long position. But if the holder of the long position just so happens to be sitting on all the readily available supply of the commodity under contract, the short seller faces an unenviable choice: go scrounge up some of the very scarce product in order to “make delivery” or just pay the cornerer a hefty premium and nullify the deal entirely.
In this case, the cornerer is actually counting on the shorts to do the latter, says Craig Pirrong, professor of finance at the University of Houston. If too many short sellers find that it actually costs less to deliver the product, the market manipulator will be stuck with warehouses full of inventory. Finance experts refer to selling the all the excess supply after building a corner as “burying the corpse.”
“That is when the price collapses,” explains Pirrong. “But if the number of deliveries isn’t too high, the loss from selling at the low price after the corner is smaller than the profit from selling contracts at the high price.”
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The Chicago Board of Trade trading floor. Photo credit: Jeremy Kemp

Even so, when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission found that a single family from Texas had contracted to buy a sizable portion of the 1977 soybean crop, they did not accuse the Hunts of outright market manipulation. Instead, noting that the Hunts had exceeded the 3 million bushel aggregate limit on soybean holdings by about 20 million, the CFTC noted that the Hunt’s “excessive holdings threaten disruption of the market and could cause serious injury to the American public.” The CFTC ordered the Hunts to sell and to pay a penalty of $500,000.
Though the Hunts made tens of millions of dollars on paper while soybean prices skyrocketed, it’s unclear whether they were able to cash out before the regulatory intervention. In any case, the Hunts were none too pleased with the decision.
“Apparently the CFTC is trying to repeal the law of supply and demand,” Bunker complained to the press.
Silver Thursday
Despite the run in with regulators, the Hunts were not dissuaded. Bunker and Herbert had eased up on silver after their initial big buy in 1973, but in the fall of 1979, they were back with a vengeance. By the end of the year, Bunker and Herbert owned 21 million ounces of physical silver each. They had even larger positions in the silver futures market: Bunker was long on 45 million ounces, while Herbert held contracts for 20 million. Their little brother Lamar also had a more “modest” position.
By the new year, with every dollar increase in the price of silver, the Hunts were making $100 million on paper. But unlike most investors, when their profitable futures contracts expired, they took delivery. As in 1973, they arranged to have the metal flown to Switzerland. Intentional or not, this helped create a shortage of the metal for industrial supply.
Naturally, the industrialists were unhappy. From a spot price of around $6 per ounce in early 1979, the price of silver shot up to $50.42 in January of 1980. In the same week, silver futures contracts were trading at $46.80. Film companies like Kodak saw costs go through the roof, while the British film producer, Ilford, was forced to lay off workers. Traditional bullion dealers, caught in a squeeze, cried foul to the commodity exchanges, and the New York jewelry house Tiffany & Co. took out a full page ad in the New York Times slamming the “unconscionable” Hunt brothers. They were right to single out the Hunts; in mid-January, they controlled 69% of all the silver futures contracts on the Commodity Exchange (COMEX) in New York.
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Source: New York Times

But as the high prices persisted, new silver began to come out of the woodwork.
“In the U.S., people rifled their dresser drawers and sofa cushions to find dimes and quarters with silver content and had them melted down,” says Pirrong, from the University of Houston. “Silver is a classic part of a bride’s trousseau in India, and when prices got high, women sold silver out of their trousseaus.”
According to a Washington Post article published that March, the D.C. police warned residents of a rash of home burglaries targeting silver.
Unfortunately for the Hunts, all this new supply had a predictable effect. Rather than close out their contracts, short sellers suddenly found it was easier to get their hands on new supplies of silver and deliver.
“The main factor that has caused corners to fail [throughout history] is that the manipulator has underestimated how much will be delivered to him if he succeeds [at] raising the price to artificial levels,” says Pirrong. “Eventually, the Hunts ran out of money to pay for all the silver that was thrown at them.”
In financial terms, the brothers had a large corpse on their hands—and no way to bury it.
This proved to be an especially big problem, because it wasn’t just the Hunt fortune that was on the line. Of the $6.6 billion worth of silver the Hunts held at the top of the market, the brothers had “only” spent a little over $1 billion of their own money. The rest was borrowed from over 20 banks and brokerage houses.
At the same time, COMEX decided to crack down. On January 7, 1980, the exchange’s board of governors announced that it would cap the size of silver futures exposure to 3 million ounces. Those in excess of the cap (say, by the tens of millions) were given until the following month to bring themselves into compliance. But that was too long for the Chicago Board of Trade exchange, which suspended the issue of any new silver futures on January 21. Silver futures traders would only be allowed to square up old contracts.
Predictably, silver prices began to slide. As the various banks and other firms that had backed the Hunt bullion binge began to recognize the tenuousness of their financial position, they issued margin calls, asking the brothers to put up more money as collateral for their debts. The Hunts, unable to sell silver lest they trigger a panic, borrowed even more. By early March, futures contracts had fallen to the mid-$30 range.
Matters finally came to a head on March 25, when one of the Hunts’ largest backers, the Bache Group, asked for $100 million more in collateral. The brothers were out of cash, and Bache was unwilling to accept silver in its place, as it had been doing throughout the month. With the Hunts in default, Bache did the only thing it could to start recouping its losses: it start to unload silver.
On March 27, “Silver Thursday,” the silver futures market dropped by a third to $10.80. Just two months earlier, these contracts had been trading at four times that amount.
The Aftermath
After the oil bust of the early 1980s and a series of lawsuits polished off the remainder of the Hunt brothers’ once historic fortune, the two declared bankruptcy in 1988. Bunker, who had been worth an estimated $16 billion in the 1960s, emerged with under $10 million to his name. That’s not exactly chump change, but it wasn’t enough to maintain his 500-plus stable of horses,.
The Hunts almost dragged their lenders into bankruptcy too—and with them, a sizable chunk of the U.S. financial system. Over twenty financial institutions had extended over a billion dollars in credit to the Hunt brothers. The default and resulting collapse of silver prices blew holes in balance sheets across Wall Street. A privately orchestrated bailout loan from a number of banks allowed the brothers to start paying off their debts and keep their creditors afloat, but the markets and regulators were rattled.
Silver Spot Prices Per Ounce (January, 1979 - June, 1980)
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Source: Trading Economics

In the words of then CFTC chief James Stone, the Hunts’ antics had threatened to punch a hole in the “financial fabric of the United States” like nothing had in decades. Writing about the entire episode a year later, Harper’s Magazine described Silver Thursday as “the first great panic since October 1929.”
The trouble was not over for the Hunts. In the following years, the brothers were dragged before Congressional hearings, got into a legal spat with their lenders, and were sued by a Peruvian mineral marketing company, which had suffered big losses in the crash. In 1988, a New York City jury found for the South American firm, levying a penalty of over $130 million against the Hunts and finding that they had deliberately conspired to corner the silver market.
Surprisingly, there is still some disagreement on that point.
Bunker Hunt attributed the whole affair to the political motives of COMEX insiders and regulators. Referring to himself later as “a favorite whipping boy” of an eastern financial establishment riddled with liberals and socialists, Bunker and his brother, Herbert, are still perceived as martyrs by some on the far-right.
“Political and financial insiders repeatedly changed the rules of the game,” wrote the New American. “There is little evidence to support the ‘corner the market’ narrative.”
Though the Hunt brothers clearly amassed a staggering amount of silver and silver derivatives at the end of the 1970s, it is impossible to prove definitively that market manipulation was in their hearts. Maybe, as the Hunts always claimed, they just really believed in the enduring value of silver.
Or maybe, as others have noted, the Hunt brothers had no idea what they were doing. Call it the stupidity defense.
“They’re terribly unsophisticated,” an anonymous associated was quoted as saying of the Hunts in a Chicago Tribune article from 1989. “They make all the mistakes most other people make,” said another.
p.s. credit to Ben Christopher
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This is a PvP game. That means there will always be losers. In fact 100% of games result in a loss for 1 of 2 teams.
If you can only see the win, instead of what happens between the start and the end, then you won't have a good time. Losses are an opportunity to see what you did wrong, and what they did better. If you are worried about wins to the point you can't enjoy the game if you lose, then you will take much longer to realize what you have to do in game to win. There are an alarmingly high number of players who angrily queue over and over again gambling for seals/easy wins. These individuals can't take a loss and they won't learn from those losses. They feel entitled to equally matched games because they are playing not to improve their tactics or technique, they are playing to get an endorphin rush from easy wins.
If you rise to the challenge and are mindful of your performance moment to moment, then you will become better, faster, and your wins and rank will eventually reflect this.
IThere is a heavy correlation between easy going players who don't dodge and can take a loss, and high skill level. I can name so many players who never ran from a fight and focused on what they can do to win, who quickly rose to the top ahead of the people who used to beat them game after game. Their constitution for playing is higher because they don't rage quit after a few losses, so they get better, faster.
If you're a new player, I beg you to please be mindful and not leverage your enjoyment to your win percentage. If you find yourself in this situation, try to rethink how you approach gaming and challenges in general. Resolve, persistence, and reflection are the three Rs which will bring you to excellence. Gambling for wins without actually improving will make you another salty, serial dodging player of average or lower performance.
I love this game and I love this community. Let's come together to make it a healthier, more sportsman like community. For your mental health, and the benefit of everyone involved, focus on the game and let's make it fun no matter the out come.
If you can find a way to improve each game, then you'll never lose!

This is a rather long one and the last in this particular Universe for a while, enjoy!
​
Admiral Alexis was... Bored... When the usual suspects called for an emergency meeting he expected another war, some sort of political snafu or maybe a major discovery that would require his input.
Once he learned how little was at stake he stopped really listening, as far as he's was concerned it was just about someone cheating at video games...
****************************** The War Games had first been introduced as a way to create camaraderie between the races and to have hard data on the strategies and capabilities of the different races.
The Noradons had been the only ones who participated along side the Humans.
Targeting locks would count as hits for space combat, smoke would be artillery explosions, low level electric batons would be used to simulate blades and good old paint balls for live ammunition.
The result was an overwhelming win for the Humans, the Noradons' new Overseer, Talon, was far too direct in his approach, the only victories he achieve were when he had superior numbers and never in defense scenarios.
He didn't care for traps, small deployment of troops, scouts, listening to his officers on the ground or any type of subterfuge.
The second was a more balanced affair, the Noradons had now far more specialist units and Talon had learned from his mistakes.
It was also a lot more popular, it wasn't viewed as a barbaric display of power like the first one but as a more violent sporting event.
Thou the second game was better remembered for the arrival of the A/O during the closing of the games.
****************************** The ceremony was finished, everyone was picking up their things and preparing to leave.
Kin son of Krono, host of the ceremony at the Commonwealth's HQ had the classic bartender's look that screamed: you don't have to go home but you can't stay here...
That is until Lawless contacted him.
A massive ship, dreadnought class from the tonnage, had just entered the system, it would be here in mere minutes.
Seeing how The Pale Horse and the Queen's Fury, the only known dreadnoughts, were already there this was worrisome to say the least.
He urged everyone to remain, not that anyone was going to leave now, this was exactly what the War Games were ultimately about: being ready when the time came to fight.
By the time the unknown ship emerged, the Combined fleet, the Noradons swarm along side the dozen or so ships of the Imphlasms were ready for anything, the Va'sh had stayed home.
Historians still wonder to this day what would have happened had they been present.
The ship was an odd mix of science and gardening gone wrong, an icosahedron with a power signature better measured in stars covered in moss and vines.
Admiral Alexis: “Identify yourself and your intentions”
Unknown Ship: “We are us, we wish to learn all there is to know”
Admiral Alexis: Huh, doesn't sound too bad
Unknown Ship: “We wish to be the only sentient races alive!”
Alexis: Ah, this would be the other shoe dropping, “We can help you with that first part but do not think we will just allow ourselves to be killed without a fight”
The Unknown Ship powered what looked like weapons
The fleets above Commonwealth HQ were ready for combat and spread out in loose formations, combat was about to be joined.
Than came from Commonwealth's Law a message sent on all frequencies
3.14: “Very well and than what?”
Unknown Ship: “... We would be safe and no other sentient beings would add needless variables to the grand equation”
3.14: Grand equation? Have we finally run into civilized alien lifeforms!?, “I assume the grand equation is a single mathematical formula that explains and predicts all things in the Universe?”
Unknown Ship sounding happy and not monotone for the first time: “Yes!”
3.14: “So your plan is to remove all sentient beings to make it safe and easier to calculate”
Unknown Ship: “Yes, that would be optimal”
3.14: “And you would just exist like that until the heat death of the Universe?”
Unknown Ship: “The what?”
Admiral Alexis was growing impatient, the Krush ambassador and the Ship had been talking astrophysics for two hours now, the Unknown Ship powered down their weapons into the first few minutes of this discussion and it was looking like there would be no fighting after all.
Unknown Ship: “I see, so no matter what, eventually all things would end”
3.14: “It is inevitable”
Unknown Ship: “Perhaps, perhaps not, we will think on how to prevent this, it is a far more grievous threat than any alien species consuming us”
3.14: “Yes that would be a worthy endeavor to occupy a mind like... Wait, eat you!?”
The threat of conflict over, proper introductions took place, the Ship was composed of two species: the moss and vines was a single plant entity and the ship itself a massive AI, the first true and somehow naturally occurring AI the galaxy had ever known.
They had met by accident, the plant life form floated into the hull of the AI on a small meteor and grew there, the AI could easily predict how it behaved, it liked the little plant and they formed a bond.
In their travels they intercepted Commonwealth transmissions.
The Plant accessed the holo-net and saw that every sentient species ate plants in some capacity, the AI saw the chaos some species were capable off.
They decided to strike first but upon learning how all would one day end shifted focus to finding a may to prevent it.
They were giving a name: Alpha for being first of their kind and Omega for their shared goal to see that the end never happens, A/O for short.
They chose to stay in orbit around Commonwealth HQ, doing nothing of note.
Sometimes the AI would discuss theories with the scientifically inclined races on how to prevent heat death and the Plant would have philosophical debates on what constitutes life with the more spiritual races.
****************************** Alexis sighed
That was then, this is now
Alexis looked at Ambassador Paul trying and failing to convince the others of the gravity of the situation.
“This could prove a huge security risk, we must find out who is doing this!”
Alexis had had enough
“No offense but finding out who is messing with the War Game's holo settings isn't much of a threat”
Paul: “The most likely scenario is that someone is interfering with the Games in order to make a large profits from the bets taking place, we must find who is doing this”
3.14: “I'm pretty sure only Humans would do such a thing”
He looks at the Admiral
“No offence”
Admiral Alexis: “None taken, I mean, who else thinks it's Humans?”
Lady EliIi: “No doubt”
Warlord M'rm'n: “Of course!”
Ambassador Uv: “Makes sense”
Lawless, the AI of the Commonwealth Law sat at this meeting, she was the referee of the Games
“It's Humans, there's no question about that”
Paul: Et tu Lawless? “Anyway, I have put top men in charge of finding out the truth”
3.14: “Who?”
Paul: “Top. Men”
****************************** Lord Doros was having a bad day, the Combined ambassador had contacted Transit concerning supposed hacking of the War Games.
Normally this would be well beneath the 12 Blades but their “failure” with the Diszin incident had allowed the ambassador to call in a favor, so to speak.
Lord Doros: Pretty sure we got the job as punishment.
He thought back to the morning's meeting
Boss: “... And so we have to find who is messing with the Games and why”
Everyone looked confused, Lord Doros was fuming...
Scout K'r's lifted his paw
“Not that I mind but killing someone over rigging games feels like going overboard”
G00.106 nods
Boss sighed
“We are not to kill anyone,we simply report our finding to the officials and arrest the individuals if we can”
The specialists in the room said nothing, the shock was total, this mission was not only something they should never have to do but they would have to operate like common... Cops.
Lord Doros had had enough
“So what's next? Trade disputes? Traffic control!?”
Boss: “I understand how you feel but Transit gave us the mission and we must obey”
Lord Doros: That was 5 hours ago, now we are on the Commonwealth Law, looking for “leads”
Smith was a professional, he was given a task and would complete it, no matter how absurd.
He was meeting with Lord Doros, K'r's and G00.106 in the Commonwealth's Law cafeteria, there were dozen of groups of different races all over the place, while most individuals who participated in the Games did not travel to Commonwealth HQ, many coaches, reporters and VIPs did.
Which is why Commonwealth Law was used as a safe meeting for these individuals.
The media to try to snag any exclusives they could, the VIPs to follow the games along side fellow VIPs and the coaches for the timed honored tradition of getting in the referees face when they had a complaint.
Lord Doros was already sitting at the meeting table
“So anything?”
Smith sat at the opposite side of the table and G00.106 stayed standing her back to the two.
Smith: “No luck so far, I talked with a few coaches and the odd VIP but they let nothing slip”
Lord Doros nodded, he himself had not found anything and given the levels of security involved he doubted anyone would.
“G00.106?”
G00.106 shrugged
“Not a damn thing, I even tried asking a few males while wearing nothing but lingerie like some of the girls onboard suggested but all I got were screams and a fine for..”
She reads her datapad to get it right
“... Creepy indecent exposure”
Smith had a horrifying mental image and shuddered.
Lord Doros shuddered a second later
“Thanks for sharing specialist Smith”
Smith: “Sorry, the image just, wait a second wouldn't you have gotten the same from G00.106 anyway?”
Lord Doros shakes his head
“Noradons are now all psychically linked to the Overseer at some level, you can't read one without listening in on all of them so it comes out as static”
Smith: “Very well... So i guess we have no leads to follow”
G00.106 was slightly insulted by the conversation that had just taken place but decided to move on
“So anyway, I doubt it was Noradons, we don't really do the whole crime thing”
Lord Doros nodded
Smith: “Has anyone seen K'r's? It's not his style to be late”
Lord Doros opened his eyes wide and looked up
Smith and G00.106 followed his gaze.
K'r's was sitting above them on a lamp, his green coat and pants were torn in places, his beret was missing, chunks of fur looked to have been ripped off and he had a thousand yard stare that spoke of unimaginable horrors.
Smith: “What the Hell happened to you!”
K'r's grabbed a flask from inside his coat, unscrewed the lid and took a sip
“Ran into Captain Grace”
He than took a much, much larger drink, never making eye contact.
Smith bit his fist and looked away.
G00.106 separated her arms, jumped into the pole holding the lamp and grabbed the Va'sh, cradling him like a new born larva and looked at Lord Doros
“Permission to take specialist K'r's to the ship for medical care!”
Lord Doros nodded solemnly
“Granted”
Smith and Lord Doros watched her run to their shuttle
Smith looked concerned
“Poor bastard...”
Smith than shifted to looking as chipper as ever
“So anyway, I doubt the Noradons had anything to do with the hacking, I mean there's no such thing as Noradons' organized crime after all”
****************************** Late at night, in the middle of the workers district of the Commonwealth Capital, a G00 unit wearing a brown trench coat and a black hat was slowly making her way to a bar.
She approached carefully, looking into every shadow and jumping at every noise, she had what looked like an Xmas gift in her hand.
The box was small and by the looks of it had been wrapped by a child... Or a really drunk adult.
She eventually gathered her courage and knocked on the bar's door, two fast knocks followed by two slower ones.
The door opened a tiny fraction, the “gift” was quickly exchanged for a grey bag of unknown content.
The G00 unit left, practically running.
Inside the bar the bouncer, a soldier Noradon, wearing a tuxedo and sunglasses made his way to the back.
He walked calmly, the sentients drinking and smoking paid him no attention besides the occasional nod, which he politely returned.
He entered the VIP room, Big Vinny, the proprietor of the establishment: the Carlito's Way, was sitting on his leather couch.
He was wearing a white suit with a matching ascot, a gold chain and a massive silver ring on his dorsal right hand.
Big Vinny was an engineering drone, smaller than the average Noradon to more easily get to tight places and with three digits per arm instead of claws to use precision tools.
Not that Big Vinny was small, he was overweight which to a Noradon with a perfectly genetically built gastric system was no small feat.
The bouncer, Tony, handed him the gift, bowed and left the room.
Vinny waited for Tony to leave before opening the package, inside was a box of chocolates, sixteen total.
He smiled
Best way to get a message without risk of it getting intercepted? Code it using foodstuffs.
He put the chocolates in order, the shapes symbolized the events taking place in the following days, the filling who would win and the individual wrapping's color the optimal spread.
He committed the information to memory and ate the evidence.
Taste like... Profits!
******************************** The Games had being a huge success so far, the Humans were leading by a razor thin margin.
The sabotage event was a surprise steal by the Imphlasms following the sudden rain that made Va'sh guards miss their approach until it was too late.
They than lost the retrieve and salvage mission to the Human team who won on a technicality
The Human field engineer was quoted saying:
“The rules said we had to get the ship back faster than the other team, never said nothing about it not exploding or having it's crew making it out alive”
Which was true, thou the rules would certainly see changes for the next Games.
This year marked the first time the War Games would shift from live exercises to holo-space recreations.
As such many more species joined this time around, most were out of the running by this time however.
The Humans lead by a single event, the Noradons were in second place, the Va'sh in third and the Impshlasms in fourth.
Today was the last four scheduled events: base defense, VIP assassination, survival on a Deathworld and the three-legged race, no one was certain how that last one ended up there...
The Noradons had pulled an upset on the base defense by outsmarting the human attackers, they used the molted exoskeleton of their soldier caste to have their engineers hold the front gate while the soldiers burrowed beneath the entrance and slaughtered the attackers in the resulting pitfall trap.
The VIP assassination had been won by the Va'sh, the human guards had a hard time pulling the trigger when they attacked and the Noradons and Imphlasm simply weren't fast enough.
Thou the moment a Human sniper managed to get his laser sight on the Va'sh VIP, which resulted in his guards accidentally mauling him to death, was considered a Pyrrhic victory.
Smith had been watching the whole thing from his now usual cafeteria table, not much to do when he had already spoken to anyone who allow him to get close to them.
I hope the others had better luck...
Lord Doros approached him and sat down
“I have managed to find no leads”
Smith didn't look at him, to anyone else watching, the Aaen had just whispered to himself.
Is the kitten doing okay?
Lord Doros: “He'll be out of med-bay in a day or so”
Smith gave a barely perceptible nod
G00.106 arrived at the table, she looked in a hurry
“I have a lead! What do you know of the Carlito's Way?”
Lord Doros and Smith looked at each-other nonplus
Smith adventured an answer
“... I don't like the ending I guess?”
G00.106 looked at him like he was an idiot
“What? No I'm talking about a bar in the Commonwealth Capital, Solenia”
She explained how one of her sisters from her hive back home contacted her, to let her know if she wanted in on a gambling scheme she was part of.
“I've made 4 times my initial bet so far!”
Was what she had told her.
G00.106: “My guess is that they're somehow behind the hacking, like the rain that costed the Va'sh the sabotage mission or the Humans weapon misfire when the Va'sh attacked their VIP”
Smith: “I don't think the weapons mis... Anyway, should we contact Lawless and check this bar out?”
Lord Doros: “Yes, this seems like a solid lead”
****************************** Smith, Lord Doros, G00.106 and Lawless made their way to the Carlito's Way.
Lawless insisted on joining the team, citing how as the referee of the Games it was her duty to see those who would defile it brought to justice, thou Smith thought the AI was probably just looking to get away from the incessant complaining from the coaches...
They found the bar with no issues, it had all the proper permits and all taxes were payed.
Lord Doros: “G00.106, you take point”
G00.106 hesitated
“Shouldn't Smith do it?”
Smith: “Normally yes, but you have an actual “in” with the crowd we are trying to infiltrate, I will enter with you as a friend looking to make some money, than”
He points at Lord Doros and Lawless
“They come in later as a couple looking for an out of the way place to have a quiet drink”
Lord Doros: “Anything goes wrong, we back you up”
Smith trying to be reassuring
“See, nothing to be worried about”
G00.106: “Right. Got it!”
She than kicks the door open and while holding her shortened carbine yells
“Nobody move! We know you're conducting illegal operations, you're all under arrest!!!”
Smith and Lord Doros thought at the same time
If we survive I'm killing her myself
Lawless grins, produces a kukri from under he coat and stands in front of G00.106.
The people at the bar barely seem to notice and quickly return to their drinks and talks.
Smith and Lord Doros reluctantly drew their pulse pistols, enter the bar and stood by their colleague.
Smith: “When we get back, if we get back, we need to talk about your infiltration skills”
G00.106: “Why?”
Before smith or Lord Doros could answer, or shoot her, the door in the back opens.
Big Vinny, with Tony in tow, appear.
Smith: What the Hell, a Noradon... Don!?
He seems very calm and he speaks softly as if to an old friend's kid he's trying to explain a complicated notion to.
“What, if may ask, is the reason for this loud and quite frankly disrespectful scene in this, my humble establishment?”
G00.106: “We know what you're doing and you're going to prison, if we don't kill you right now that is!”
Vinny undisturbed
“I find such a thing rather difficult without any evidence and for any threat against my person”
Vinny snaps his fingers
Half the bar draws weapons and Tony gets in front of his boss, the infiltration team is now outnumbered five to one
Vinny: “You will find it a... Difficult task”
Smith was curious, if he was going to die today he just had to ask
“Okay, what's with the outfit?”
Vinny, positively beaming
“You like it? I modelled it after Tony Montanas's suit in Scarface”
Smith, now less curious and more confused
“The movie?”
Vinny: “Yes, we like your “mafia”, quite a novel idea”
Lawless: “Yeah well, organize crime is nothing new and even if you get rid of us more will come”
Vinny: “Crime? What crime?”
G00.106: “You rigged the War Games and make bets on them, my sisters called me and told me all about it!”
Vinny got in front of Tony, he was frowning
“Did she tell you we were actually fixing the events?”
G00.106 seemed a lot less confident all of a sudden
“Well not in so many words, no”
The rest of the team looked at her and than at each-other
Vinny: “We have a group of ex-military professionals analyze the strategies of the teams and a Krush run the odds, than we place bets on events where the margin of error matches the betting spread”
Smith: “So you aren't the ones hacking the Games?”
Vinny genuinely surprised
“The Games are getting hacked!? Well, we have nothing to do with that, we're just honest mafiosy”
Smith still concerned and very aware of the multitude of guns pointed in their direction.
“You do know they're the bad guys right?”
Vinny: “Of course but that's because they break the law”
G00.106: “Ha! Like you don't”
Smith came to a horrible realization
“Lawless could you run a quick background check on the people here for outstanding warrants”
Lawless closed her eyes for a second, smiled awkwardly and sheathed her kukri.
“No criminal records, not even a ticket and they have permits for those guns”
Lord Doros: “It seems we made a mistake”
Vinny: “Quite so but don't worry, this was exhilarating! Rocco Two Hands had been itching for a reason to draw his guns”
Vinny waved at Rocco, who was standing behind Smith
Smith looked back expecting a Noradon with only two arms but what he saw was a Noradon drone with all of his arms and a backpack with another set of four mechanical ones allowing him to hold eight guns total, all aimed at his head.
Smith: “Rocco TWO hands?”
Vinny: “It's short for Two Sets of Hands, alright fellows put the hardware away, you're scaring the tourists”
At this the entire bar sat down and no one even looked at the four who now awkwardly sheathed and holstered weapons before leaving.
Vinny as he waves them good bye
“Arividerchi!”
The four walked in silence for a while until Lawless spoke
“This never happened, agreed?”
No one said anything, there was no need.
On the way back to Commonwealth Law Lord Doros got a message on his datapad
“We have a new mission”
****************************** Lawless was spectating the survival event of the games in the cafeteria.
We didn't find the culprits, we didn't even find how they did it... Thou given how they could have done much worse than add random shit I guess we should consider ourselves lucky.
A/O had joined the other VIPs, they were curious about how things would turn out.
He approached in his holographic avatar, a small crystal cube with a single leaf inside it.
“Greetings Lawless, are you enjoying the Games?”
Lawless: “Yes, kinda”
A/O: “Is there something not to your liking? I could modify the templates further”
Lawless stopped looking at the screen and turned to the floating cube
“I'm sorry, modify the templates further?”
The cube floated up and down, trying to imitate a nod
“Yes, we found the games too easy to predict, so we added semi-random events to make sure the Games remained interesting”
Lawless, was at a loss for words an entity that wanted to boil down all the universe to a single equation had somehow hacked into the Games to “spice things up”
She mulled over a few words, a couple of ideas and just... Gave up, they hadn't hurt anyone and at least they showed an interest. She resumed watching the screen.
“Just out of curiosity, are there any modifications to the current event?”
A/O: “Yes, in the next 12 seconds the tectonic plates where the teams are situated will begin to move”
Lawless: “An earthquake?”
A/O: “Correct”
Lawless: “... During the cooking portion of the event?”
A/O: “Is that a problem?”
Screaming and some really ingenious curses can be heard from the screen as holo projections of the teams catch fire, fall face first into their food or right into their makeshift cauldrons.
Lawless shrugs
“I guess not”
****************************** Captain Grace was on a mission, she was stalking a beautiful Va'sh, a white angora kitten wearing a butlers' outfit!
She applied some more scent blockers, checked her ceramic second skin under armor, activated noise cancellers on her boots and a camo-suit to become virtually undetectable.
The kitten took a turn into a cargo hold, she followed slowly and when she felt the Va'sh couldn't possibly dodge her, she jumped!
The hologram disappeared and the door locked behind her.
Before she could look behind, someone had put a bracelet on her right hand and in the time it took her to look at it an identical one was put on her left hand.
Grace: “What is the meaning of this!”
Smith and Lord Doros simply pointed up, to a viewing window
Grace looked up and paled, Admiral Alexis, Warlord M'r'm, Alisia Black, Lady EliIi, 3.14, Ambassador Paul and the Uv Ambassador were looking down at her.
Alexis: “Grace you have gone too far, consider this an intervention”
He pushed a button and the holographic butler kitten re-appeared.
Alexis: “This is a hard light construct of a real Va'sh, you have only one thing to do, pet the kitty”
Grace was scared but she acquiesced, not that she had a lot of choice...
All those watching winced
Lord Doros and Smith made it in time to catch the “petting”
Lord Doros: I heard the Human expression “there is more than one way to skin a cat”, I guess one of them is to let Captain Grace pet it...
After a couple of minutes Captain Grace stopped
“It's not the saMEEEEEE!”
An electric shock shot out from one bracelet to the other
Grace: “What the Hell was that!”
Admiral Alexis: “That was a mild shock, you will get hit by one every time you pet the Va'sh too hard”
Grace: “Mild shock!? Are you kidding me?”
Alexis, now looking quite angry
“No, this is no joke, now Pet. The. Kitty!”
A few hours and several thousand volts later
Captain Grace looked rough, her ponytail had come undone, actually quite a bit of her hair had curled and some of it was smoking.
She had a weird twitch on her left eye and as far as Admiral Alexis could tell she stopped blinking a while ago...
Alexis: “See, that wasn't so bad?”
Captain Grace in a monotone voice
“Yes, not so bad”
Warlord M'rm'n felt generous and removed his tricorne hat and offered his head to the Captain.
“Here”
Captain Grace hesitated but ultimately pet the Va'sh head, very gently
M'rm'n: “That was nice”
Captain Grace than began twitching uncontrollably and fell to the ground, hugging her knees
“pet the kitty, pet the kitty, pet the kitty...”
Everyone stared
Eventually Lady EliIi felt the need to say out loud what everyone was thinking
“We might have gone too far”
Warlord M'rm'n shrugged
“She got her hands on the Emperor nephew last week, the video of today's intervention should be enough for him to call the hit off”
Admiral Alexis looked at the Va'sh with a mixture of shock and anger
“You're kidding right?”
The Va'sh grinned and Admiral Alexis chose to assume it was a joke, Alisia Black knew better however...
Captain Grace spent a few days in the infirmary of her own ship and is now famous, rather than infamous, with Va'shs throughout known space!
The way she gives the softest pets and how she goes completely catatonic after has made her quite popular...

Story Time: Silver short squeeze

How the Hunt Brothers Cornered the Silver Market and Then Lost it All

TL:DR: yes its long. Grab a beer.

​
Until his dying day in 2014, Nelson Bunker Hunt, who had once been the world’s wealthiest man, denied that he and his brother plotted to corner the global silver market.
Sure, back in 1980, Bunker, his younger brother Herbert, and other members of the Hunt clan owned roughly two-thirds of all the privately held silver on earth. But the historic stockpiling of bullion hadn’t been a ploy to manipulate the market, they and their sizable legal team would insist in the following years. Instead, it was a strategy to hedge against the voracious inflation of the 1970s—a monumental bet against the U.S. dollar.
Whatever the motive, it was a bet that went historically sour. The debt-fueled boom and bust of the global silver market not only decimated the Hunt fortune, but threatened to take down the U.S. financial system.
The panic of “Silver Thursday” took place over 35 years ago, but it still raises questions about the nature of financial manipulation. While many view the Hunt brothers as members of a long succession of white collar crooks, from Charles Ponzi to Bernie Madoff, others see the endearingly eccentric Texans as the victims of overstepping regulators and vindictive insiders who couldn’t stand the thought of being played by a couple of southern yokels.
In either case, the story of the Hunt brothers just goes to show how difficult it can be to distinguish illegal market manipulation from the old fashioned wheeling and dealing that make our markets work.
The Real-Life Ewings
Whatever their foibles, the Hunts make for an interesting cast of characters. Evidently CBS thought so; the family is rumored to be the basis for the Ewings, the fictional Texas oil dynasty of Dallas fame.
Sitting at the top of the family tree was H.L. Hunt, a man who allegedly purchased his first oil field with poker winnings and made a fortune drilling in east Texas. H.L. was a well-known oddball to boot, and his sons inherited many of their father’s quirks.
For one, there was the stinginess. Despite being the richest man on earth in the 1960s, Bunker Hunt (who went by his middle name), along with his younger brothers Herbert (first name William) and Lamar, cultivated an image as unpretentious good old boys. They drove old Cadillacs, flew coach, and when they eventually went to trial in New York City in 1988, they took the subway. As one Texas editor was quoted in the New York Times, Bunker Hunt was “the kind of guy who orders chicken-fried steak and Jello-O, spills some on his tie, and then goes out and buys all the silver in the world.”
Cheap suits aside, the Hunts were not without their ostentation. At the end of the 1970s, Bunker boasted a stable of over 500 horses and his little brother Lamar owned the Kansas City Chiefs. All six children of H.L.’s first marriage (the patriarch of the Hunt family had fifteen children by three women before he died in 1974) lived on estates befitting the scions of a Texas billionaire. These lifestyles were financed by trusts, but also risky investments in oil, real estate, and a host of commodities including sugar beets, soybeans, and, before long, silver.
The Hunt brothers also inherited their father’s political inclinations. A zealous anti-Communist, Bunker Hunt bankrolled conservative causes and was a prominent member of the John Birch Society, a group whose founder once speculated that Dwight Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent” of Soviet conspiracy. In November of 1963, Hunt sponsored a particularly ill-timed political campaign, which distributed pamphlets around Dallas condemning President Kennedy for alleged slights against the Constitution on the day that he was assassinated. JFK conspiracy theorists have been obsessed with Hunt ever since.
In fact, it was the Hunt brand of politics that partially explains what led Bunker and Herbert to start buying silver in 1973.
Hard Money
The 1970s were not kind to the U.S. dollar.
Years of wartime spending and unresponsive monetary policy pushed inflation upward throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. Then, in October of 1973, war broke out in the Middle East and an oil embargo was declared against the United States. Inflation jumped above 10%. It would stay high throughout the decade, peaking in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution at an annual average of 13.5% in 1980.
Over the same period of time, the global monetary system underwent a historic transformation. Since the first Roosevelt administration, the U.S. dollar had been pegged to the value of gold at a predictable rate of $35 per ounce. But in 1971, President Nixon, responding to inflationary pressures, suspended that relationship. For the first time in modern history, the paper dollar did not represent some fixed amount of tangible, precious metal sitting in a vault somewhere.
For conservative commodity traders like the Hunts, who blamed government spending for inflation and held grave reservations about the viability of fiat currency, the perceived stability of precious metal offered a financial safe harbor. It was illegal to trade gold in the early 1970s, so the Hunts turned to the next best thing.
📷

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; chart by Priceonomics

As an investment, there was a lot to like about silver. The Hunts were not alone in fleeing to bullion amid all the inflation and geopolitical turbulence, so the price was ticking up. Plus, light-sensitive silver halide is a key component of photographic film. With the growth of the consumer photography market, new production from mines struggled to keep up with demand.
And so, in 1973, Bunker and Herbert bought over 35 million ounces of silver, most of which they flew to Switzerland in specifically designed airplanes guarded by armed Texas ranch hands. According to one source, the Hunt’s purchases were big enough to move the global market.
But silver was not the Hunts' only speculative venture in the 1970s. Nor was it the only one that got them into trouble with regulators.
Soy Before Silver
In 1977, the price of soybeans was rising fast. Trade restrictions on Brazil and growing demand from China made the legume a hot commodity, and both Bunker and Herbert decided to enter the futures market in April of that year.
A future is an agreement to buy or sell some quantity of a commodity at an agreed upon price at a later date. If someone contracts to buy soybeans in the future (they are said to take the “long” position), they will benefit if the price of soybeans rise, since they have locked in the lower price ahead of time. Likewise, if someone contracts to sell (that’s called the “short” position), they benefit if the price falls, since they have locked in the old, higher price.
While futures contracts can be used by soybean farmers and soy milk producers to guard against price swings, most futures are traded by people who wouldn’t necessarily know tofu from cream cheese. As a de facto insurance contract against market volatility, futures can be used to hedge other investments or simply to gamble on prices going up (by going long) or down (by going short).
When the Hunts decided to go long in the soybean futures market, they went very, very long. Between Bunker, Herbert, and the accounts of five of their children, the Hunts collectively purchased the right to buy one-third of the entire autumn soybean harvest of the United States.
To some, it appeared as if the Hunts were attempting to corner the soybean market.
In its simplest version, a corner occurs when someone buys up all (or at least, most) of the available quantity of a commodity. This creates an artificial shortage, which drives up the price, and allows the market manipulator to sell some of his stockpile at a higher profit.
Futures markets introduce some additional complexity to the cornerer’s scheme. Recall that when a trader takes a short position on a contract, he or she is pledging to sell a certain amount of product to the holder of the long position. But if the holder of the long position just so happens to be sitting on all the readily available supply of the commodity under contract, the short seller faces an unenviable choice: go scrounge up some of the very scarce product in order to “make delivery” or just pay the cornerer a hefty premium and nullify the deal entirely.
In this case, the cornerer is actually counting on the shorts to do the latter, says Craig Pirrong, professor of finance at the University of Houston. If too many short sellers find that it actually costs less to deliver the product, the market manipulator will be stuck with warehouses full of inventory. Finance experts refer to selling the all the excess supply after building a corner as “burying the corpse.”
“That is when the price collapses,” explains Pirrong. “But if the number of deliveries isn’t too high, the loss from selling at the low price after the corner is smaller than the profit from selling contracts at the high price.”
📷

The Chicago Board of Trade trading floor. Photo credit: Jeremy Kemp

Even so, when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission found that a single family from Texas had contracted to buy a sizable portion of the 1977 soybean crop, they did not accuse the Hunts of outright market manipulation. Instead, noting that the Hunts had exceeded the 3 million bushel aggregate limit on soybean holdings by about 20 million, the CFTC noted that the Hunt’s “excessive holdings threaten disruption of the market and could cause serious injury to the American public.” The CFTC ordered the Hunts to sell and to pay a penalty of $500,000.
Though the Hunts made tens of millions of dollars on paper while soybean prices skyrocketed, it’s unclear whether they were able to cash out before the regulatory intervention. In any case, the Hunts were none too pleased with the decision.
“Apparently the CFTC is trying to repeal the law of supply and demand,” Bunker complained to the press.
Silver Thursday
Despite the run in with regulators, the Hunts were not dissuaded. Bunker and Herbert had eased up on silver after their initial big buy in 1973, but in the fall of 1979, they were back with a vengeance. By the end of the year, Bunker and Herbert owned 21 million ounces of physical silver each. They had even larger positions in the silver futures market: Bunker was long on 45 million ounces, while Herbert held contracts for 20 million. Their little brother Lamar also had a more “modest” position.
By the new year, with every dollar increase in the price of silver, the Hunts were making $100 million on paper. But unlike most investors, when their profitable futures contracts expired, they took delivery. As in 1973, they arranged to have the metal flown to Switzerland. Intentional or not, this helped create a shortage of the metal for industrial supply.
Naturally, the industrialists were unhappy. From a spot price of around $6 per ounce in early 1979, the price of silver shot up to $50.42 in January of 1980. In the same week, silver futures contracts were trading at $46.80. Film companies like Kodak saw costs go through the roof, while the British film producer, Ilford, was forced to lay off workers. Traditional bullion dealers, caught in a squeeze, cried foul to the commodity exchanges, and the New York jewelry house Tiffany & Co. took out a full page ad in the New York Times slamming the “unconscionable” Hunt brothers. They were right to single out the Hunts; in mid-January, they controlled 69% of all the silver futures contracts on the Commodity Exchange (COMEX) in New York.
📷

Source: New York Times

But as the high prices persisted, new silver began to come out of the woodwork.
“In the U.S., people rifled their dresser drawers and sofa cushions to find dimes and quarters with silver content and had them melted down,” says Pirrong, from the University of Houston. “Silver is a classic part of a bride’s trousseau in India, and when prices got high, women sold silver out of their trousseaus.”
According to a Washington Post article published that March, the D.C. police warned residents of a rash of home burglaries targeting silver.
Unfortunately for the Hunts, all this new supply had a predictable effect. Rather than close out their contracts, short sellers suddenly found it was easier to get their hands on new supplies of silver and deliver.
“The main factor that has caused corners to fail [throughout history] is that the manipulator has underestimated how much will be delivered to him if he succeeds [at] raising the price to artificial levels,” says Pirrong. “Eventually, the Hunts ran out of money to pay for all the silver that was thrown at them.”
In financial terms, the brothers had a large corpse on their hands—and no way to bury it.
This proved to be an especially big problem, because it wasn’t just the Hunt fortune that was on the line. Of the $6.6 billion worth of silver the Hunts held at the top of the market, the brothers had “only” spent a little over $1 billion of their own money. The rest was borrowed from over 20 banks and brokerage houses.
At the same time, COMEX decided to crack down. On January 7, 1980, the exchange’s board of governors announced that it would cap the size of silver futures exposure to 3 million ounces. Those in excess of the cap (say, by the tens of millions) were given until the following month to bring themselves into compliance. But that was too long for the Chicago Board of Trade exchange, which suspended the issue of any new silver futures on January 21. Silver futures traders would only be allowed to square up old contracts.
Predictably, silver prices began to slide. As the various banks and other firms that had backed the Hunt bullion binge began to recognize the tenuousness of their financial position, they issued margin calls, asking the brothers to put up more money as collateral for their debts. The Hunts, unable to sell silver lest they trigger a panic, borrowed even more. By early March, futures contracts had fallen to the mid-$30 range.
Matters finally came to a head on March 25, when one of the Hunts’ largest backers, the Bache Group, asked for $100 million more in collateral. The brothers were out of cash, and Bache was unwilling to accept silver in its place, as it had been doing throughout the month. With the Hunts in default, Bache did the only thing it could to start recouping its losses: it start to unload silver.
On March 27, “Silver Thursday,” the silver futures market dropped by a third to $10.80. Just two months earlier, these contracts had been trading at four times that amount.
The Aftermath
After the oil bust of the early 1980s and a series of lawsuits polished off the remainder of the Hunt brothers’ once historic fortune, the two declared bankruptcy in 1988. Bunker, who had been worth an estimated $16 billion in the 1960s, emerged with under $10 million to his name. That’s not exactly chump change, but it wasn’t enough to maintain his 500-plus stable of horses,.
The Hunts almost dragged their lenders into bankruptcy too—and with them, a sizable chunk of the U.S. financial system. Over twenty financial institutions had extended over a billion dollars in credit to the Hunt brothers. The default and resulting collapse of silver prices blew holes in balance sheets across Wall Street. A privately orchestrated bailout loan from a number of banks allowed the brothers to start paying off their debts and keep their creditors afloat, but the markets and regulators were rattled.
Silver Spot Prices Per Ounce (January, 1979 - June, 1980)
📷

Source: Trading Economics

In the words of then CFTC chief James Stone, the Hunts’ antics had threatened to punch a hole in the “financial fabric of the United States” like nothing had in decades. Writing about the entire episode a year later, Harper’s Magazine described Silver Thursday as “the first great panic since October 1929.”
The trouble was not over for the Hunts. In the following years, the brothers were dragged before Congressional hearings, got into a legal spat with their lenders, and were sued by a Peruvian mineral marketing company, which had suffered big losses in the crash. In 1988, a New York City jury found for the South American firm, levying a penalty of over $130 million against the Hunts and finding that they had deliberately conspired to corner the silver market.
Surprisingly, there is still some disagreement on that point.
Bunker Hunt attributed the whole affair to the political motives of COMEX insiders and regulators. Referring to himself later as “a favorite whipping boy” of an eastern financial establishment riddled with liberals and socialists, Bunker and his brother, Herbert, are still perceived as martyrs by some on the far-right.
“Political and financial insiders repeatedly changed the rules of the game,” wrote the New American. “There is little evidence to support the ‘corner the market’ narrative.”
Though the Hunt brothers clearly amassed a staggering amount of silver and silver derivatives at the end of the 1970s, it is impossible to prove definitively that market manipulation was in their hearts. Maybe, as the Hunts always claimed, they just really believed in the enduring value of silver.
Or maybe, as others have noted, the Hunt brothers had no idea what they were doing. Call it the stupidity defense.
“They’re terribly unsophisticated,” an anonymous associated was quoted as saying of the Hunts in a Chicago Tribune article from 1989. “They make all the mistakes most other people make,” said another.
p.s. credit to Ben Christopher

UPDATE 10/22/20: Observed massive divergence in live feed data, leading in large part to incorrect interpretations on INTC, NFLX, and IBM. Will most likely pause predictions for a day or so (until confident of resolution). Live feeds on thenope.info will also likely be taken down for a short time. I'll keep you guys posted. So sorry!
I'm going to keep this as a running thread/sticky not only for my own amusement and forward testing, but to give you all some new ways to lose money.
Even in the best case, NOPE has a roughly 70-80% chance of success, and may change/be proven invalid when we get new data. Play at your own risk; this is ER. Use this only to make a slightly more informed guess if you were already going to gamble on ER in the first place!
In general, for NOPE based plays, I will make a decision by 3:45 PM EST, or about 15 minutes before the market closes. This isn't to be a jackass; this is because the true value for the prediction only converges end of day, and even there's a moderate chance that it could flip in the last several minutes.
If you do these plays, I suggest also checking on https://thenope.info and validating the scores yourself, especially as the market closes. As a general rule of thumb I will select the following earnings plays to recommend:

1. Daily options volume is high enough compared to share volume - This is the combined call + put volume vs shares volume. It needs to be high or NOPE doesn't actually even remotely predict anything.
2. NOPE/NOPE_MAD looks sufficiently bullish/bearish - This, if you remember my last post, usually happens when NOPE_MAD is >= 3 sigma, or <= -3 sigma. If historical data is missing from the site (most tickers we don't track, due to $$$), then I'll defer to using NOPE alone, and my cutoff is around >= 20.

I also suggest highly, highly highly highly highly playing with shares, not options. The major reason for this is to my knowledge, there is no certainty regarding what happens after the after-market/pre-market session closes, because the market is a fickle beast, and doesn't listen to logic and also fuck your calls (that sweet IV crush/price decoherence).
I outlined my strategy before, but essentially:

1. Buy shares in the last 5-10 minutes of the market session (however many you want to risk)
2. Wait til the ER report drops
3. If price is going up/you feel it will go up, then hold; otherwise sell when you feel weakness or it drops rapidly
4. Do not use NOPE to predict behavior outside of the AH/PM session where ER occurs.

You can also do options, but I take literally no blame when that blows up hilariously for you.
I'm going to keep a list here, starting today's (10-19-2020) session:

10-22-2020 NOPE plays:

Lily's Curated Plays (Am human, not model): INTC, AXP
$INTC - BULLISH, Confidence: Medium/High - NOPE_MAD is great (6+ sigma), NOPE is decent - Outcome: Correct
This prediction is incorrect. The actual prediction based on our correct historical data was -3.86 sigma, which was bearish.
Please see my twitter feed for details and my below stickied comment. https://twitter.com/nope_its_lily/status/1319488940269735936
$MAT - Ambiguous (Sorry!)
$STX - Bearish, Confidence: Low/Medium - NOPE_MAD low, NOPE is decent but ambiguous. Option/share volume not great but usable. Also it got killed last two ERs, so be careful here since it might pull a rabbit out of a hat.
Outcome: Correct
$LLNW - Ambiguous (Sorry!)
$CLF - Bullish, Confidence: Low - NOPE_MAD no data, moderately good NOPE but not stellar. Probably would avoid.
$SAM - Bullish, Confidence: Low - NOPE is good, no NOPE_MAD data though, and options and share volume are both low. Has high chance to move in either direction due to low trading volume.
Outcome: Correct
$ABB - Ambiguous
$ABCB - Ambiguous
$AXP - Bullish, Confidence: Medium/High - NOPE and NOPE_MAD are both good, been on a rally all day due to buying calls. Likely my personal recommended play today if you decide to play, but be careful - high NOPE_MAD plays are more likely to hit, but not 100% (close to 80% on dataset).
$VRSN - Bullish, Confidence: Low - NOPE_MAD is excellent here, but NOPE is ambiguous, and the option volume is really low. Exercise massive caution here.
Outcome: Incorrect

10-21-2020 NOPE plays:

CMG - Bullish (buy shares) - Confidence: Medium - Outcome: Incorrect!
Notes: Volume for both options and shares on CMG are not great, but the combination of both of them seems strong. Play if you must, but there are better ERs to risk.
NOTE PLEASE DO NOT PLAY TESLA. EVEN IF THE MODEL IS RIGHT, TESLA IS ITS OWN ENTITY, AND LOSSES MAY BE SEVERE. I WILL POST THE INFO HERE FOR COMPLETENESS BUT I DO NOT NOT NOT RECOMMEND PLAYING TESLA.
XLNX - Bearish (short) - Confidence: Medium/High - Outcome: Incorrect! [may die in PM, up +1%]
Notes: Raw NOPE and NOPE_MAD both very bearish. Good play to short shares, not sure about buying puts.
LVS - Bullish(buy shares) - Confidence: Medium - Outcome: Correct!
Notes: Raw NOPE is roughly 16% which is decent, but NOPE_MAD is quite high (>= 3 sigma). As of now, something like 66-70% chance of bullish according to model.

10-20-2020 NOPE plays:

IRBT - Bearish (short shares) - Confidence: Medium (no NOPE_MAD, NOPE is roughly -11.6%) - Outcome: Correct!
NFLX - Bullish (buy shares) - Confidence: Low/Medium (NOPE_MAD is low, but NOPE is above threshold) - Outcome: Incorrect! - in the future I will drop any low/medium confidence predictions to avoid people fomoing in. I did not play it.
This prediction is incorrect. The actual prediction based on our correct historical data was -26.6% NOPE / -2 sigma, which was bearish or ambiguous.
Please see my twitter feed for details and my below stickied comment. https://twitter.com/nope_its_lily/status/1319488940269735936
SNAP - Moderately Bullish (buy shares) - Confidence: Medium (no NOPE_MAD data, NOPE is ~= 20%) - Outcome: Correct!
TXN - Ambiguous, avoid (no action recommendable), leaning bullish - Confidence: Medium (NOPE_MAD data is bullish, NOPE is still super low) - Outcome: Correct!
Didn't post this since didn't want someone to play BIIB in the BMO (10/21/2020) but:
BIIB - Bearish (Short Shares) - Confidence: Medium/High: Outcome: Correct!

10-19-2020 NOPE plays:

LOGI - Bullish (buy shares) - Outcome: Extremely Correct (Opened in US Pre-market at 97, still around 95 vs. close at 80)
IBM - Bullish (buy shares) - Outcome: Incorrect (Price dropped 2-3% AH)
This prediction is incorrect. The actual prediction based on our correct historical data was 2 sigma or approximately 8% NOPE which was ambiguous..
Please see my twitter feed for details and my below stickied comment. https://twitter.com/nope_its_lily/status/1319488940269735936
This content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as investment, financial, or other advice. Nothing contained on this site constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, to buy or sell any securities or other financial instruments. Nothing contained in this post should be construed as a recommendation or as a guarantee of any specific outcome.
You can follow plays and market musings on my Twitter: https://twitter.com/nope_its_lily

My Gramp and Gram raised my brothers and me for a goodly part of our childhood. Our summers would be spent on their family farm way back among the mountains and hollers (hollows) of our ancestral landscape. When Mom and Dad went their seperate ways, we went to live with them year-round. It wasn’t what Momma wanted, but she had a hard time for a long time after he left. She had the littler ones to take care of, and we boys were more than she could handle on her own.
It was a good life - one of hard work, because everyone had to do their part, including us, as young as we were. There are places still where youngsters not yet ten years old have callouses on their hands, but maybe not as many as there used to be. I had mine. We had ours.
But it taught us early on that the food you ate came from hard work, as we grew much of ours. It was a valuable lesson that would stand us in good stead for the rest of our lives. None of us were ever shirkers. But, damn! I hated pulling weeds and hoeing those endless rows of corn!
Soybean harvest was a hell of a time. We grew fields of it in addition to everything else on what flat ground there was. It was extra winter fodder for the stock, along with low-grade corn grown and dried for the purpose (as opposed to what we grew for ourselves), dried corn husks, hay, and the grain and feed that we bought or traded for.
The soybeans, when ready, would be mown by hand with big two-handed sythes (picture the Grim Reaper, and we Were reapers) to lay just right. Once they had dried and cured enough, we use pitchforks to load ‘em up, truckload by truckload, and store them in an old barn we used for the purpose. We’d fill that fucker to the rafters. You had to lay it all up just right, though, so the air could circulate through it all. Pack it too tight, mold would grow and spread, and you’d just done a hard season’s work for nothing. That was an all day job, sometimes two or three, and we’d be dead worn out by the end of it.
Little brother sliced his knee wide open once, on one of those sythe blades; just below the kneecap. Gram kept it cleaned and dressed, with liniment on it, and left it to heal. Nobody went to the doctor for minor shit like that. He had a hell of a scar for years, a big red eye-shaped thing from where the edges never pulled together and new skin grew to cover the open wound.
Hell, Gramp cut his thumb damn near half way off once when he slipped on a slick rock in the creek bed while retrieving a minnow trap he’d set out to catch bait fish for fishing. The securing line had knotted tight, and he had his knife out to cut it. The blade sliced down through the webbing between his thumb and finger nearly to the bone. He kept that blade razor sharp on a big Arkansas whet-stone that sat on the well box, the surface worn smooth as glass from repeated use over the years.
He didn’t say a word or make a sound; just washed the wound out good in the running creek water, went to the house and poured alcohol in it, and wrapped it in a clean rag. It took a little while, but it healed just fine. He was one tough old man, and he’d had worse.
Times when there wasn’t work to be done, though, Good Lord! We had the run of the hills, and complete freedom to roam. We could go where we wanted and do what we wanted, like the half-wild things we were. The nearest neighbor was two miles away, and the world was our plaything.
We made the most of it. There were creeks to wade and swim in, trees and cliffs to climb, caves to explore, and vines to swing on.
Wild grape vines grew in the hills. The best way to make use of them was to find one on a steep slope, or, preferably, at the edge of a cliff or rock face. You would back off with it until you had stretched it as tight as it would go, grab hold tight, run toward the edge as fast as you could, and swing way out over empty air. There was nothing like it. Tarzan didn’t have shit on us.
You had to pick the right vine, though, a good, sturdy one - yank on it hard a few times to make sure it wouldn’t brake, really put your weight into it. Some of them would be anchored to the tree at the top by not much more than twigs. Swing out off the edge of a thirty-foot cliff face on one of those and have it snap free, it was your ass.
We had a cousin from the city learn about that the hard way once. He didn’t know any better. We were teenagers then, he older than us. He’d brought his girlfriend with him, and was trying to impress. He didn’t know to test the vine first, and sure enough, he picked the wrong one. We yelled and tried to stop his dumb ass, but it was too late.
He let out a loud King of the Apes yodel I guess he thought would make her damp her panties, took a run and a jump, and was airborne. The yodel turned into a scream as that fucker snapped clean off at the top.
We knew it was going to happen, and there wasn’t a damn thing we could do but watch. It had been nice knowing him. He wasn’t a bad guy. His Momma was going to be sad.
The only thing that saved him from more serious injury was the steep pitch of the slope at the base of the cliff. He hit the ground hard, and went tumbling down the slope like he was auditioning for a circus acrobatic act. He bounced off of a couple of trees on the way, and went off the edge of a fifteen-foot rock face to land face-down in the creek.
He got a broken arm out of the deal. At least it wasn’t his neck.
His girlfriend wasn’t impressed. She screamed a little bit and cried a lot, though. I guess she liked him.
We told him he was a dumbass. You do ignorant shit, you bring things on yourself. We had no sympathy.
We got yelled at some. He was an infant in the woods, and we were supposed to be looking out for him.
It was hard on us boys when the folks split up. We were young kids at the time. Things were bad when he was with us. He was a hard worker, but was an out-of-control alcoholic for as long as I knew him, so we never had much. He made decent money, but drank a lot of it up. He would go on benders and sometimes disappear for days at a time.
There were a few times when we didn’t know where he was, and there was nothing to eat in the house. With hungry kids to feed, Momma would have to beg food from neighbors. That was hard on her.
A time or two when he was home, passed out on the bed after having returned from a bar somewhere, she would send my brother and me to go through his pockets looking for money, if he still had any. We were scared shitless we’d wake him up. He could turn violent.
But he would always direct it at Momma. I can remember sitting on the stairs in the middle of the night with the littler kids, all of us staring unspeaking into space as we listened to him slapping Momma around downstairs, and her pleading with him to stop and defending herself as best she could.
He never did hit any of us. Momma told him once that if he ever laid a hand on us, she’d kill him in his sleep. I think he believed her.
I was the oldest, and felt responsible for the littler ones. I’d have done my best to protect them, if he came after us, but he never did. I was seven at the time.
Things got so bad that, at one point, there were times when I would kind of just zone out, and stop what I was doing and just stand staring into space. I never remembered anything in between the time I stepped out of things and the time I came back. Sometimes I’d pass out, and have to be revived. Doctors said it was the stress.
Little brother tried to kill him once. Dad had Momma pinned down in a recliner and was slapping her repeatedly, backhand and forehand, as she kicked at him and tried to fend him off.
Little bro ran into the kitchen and grabbed a fork from the drawer. I don’t know why he didn’t choose a knife - just snatched up the first thing he saw, I guess. He ran up behind the old man and tried to stab him in the back with it. Four years old, but, by God, he was going to protect his Momma. My other brother and I had to grab him and wrestle it out of his hand, and he fought us the whole time. We didn’t care if he hurt Dad, but we were afraid he’d turn on the little guy.
That same four-year-old would become a fearless and to-be-feared young man. He never got very big. He was a little guy, and skinny. But he had this rage in him, man! I guess maybe it stemmed from past events.
People were afraid of him, and rightly so. He got picked on a lot, because he was small, but no one ever did it more than once. He was afraid of nothing and nobody, and he didn’t hold back. He hurt people.
He came walking up to the house once, covered in blood. One of our other brothers ran out to help him, asking what had happened. He just smiled this cold smile and replied “It ain’t mine.” Someone had made the mistake of crossing him, again.
He beat a 6’ 2”, 220 pound, 32-year-old man unconscious once, for offering insult to our Mother, and tried to break his legs with a cinder block as he lay on the ground. He was 16 years old at the time, maybe 5’ 4”, and weighed a hundred pounds.
I had to go speak with his school principle once, when I was home on leave, to persuade the man to give him another chance and let him back into school. He had been suspended; the fourth fight in two weeks.
He eventually did a stint in juvy. A condition of his release was that he attend psychological counseling and give up his martial arts training.
Little bro eventually did a stint in the Navy. Today he is a Father, and a Grandfather, a fan and player of classical Spanish acoustic guitar, owns his own home, has worked the same great job for nearly thirty years, and has been married to the same wonderful woman for as long. He has never raised his hand in anger to her, his Children, or his Grandchildren. He is a calm, considered man, and compassionate to others.
But he is still as fearless as he was in his youth, and will be pushed only so far. Those who know him know that when he gets still and quiet is the dangerous time. What was about to be said had best be left unsaid. What was about to be done is best left undone.
He’s one of the finest men I have ever known, and one of those that I love and respect the most.
As I said, things were bad when Dad was with us, and they were hard when he was gone. But with all that, we boys still loved him. We missed our Dad. We were children, and clung to the handful of good times, and tried to forget the rest. He was a good father and husband when he was sober; kind and funny. You try to forget the rest.
When he was still with us, and I was small, we would watch Ali fight in live televised bouts on television. He was a little racist, and didn’t like the guy’s personality, but he openly admired his skill, and considered him perhaps the greatest fighter of all time.
He would take me to work with him sometimes, and we would spend the shift together, talking and laughing. Those were good times.
On one of his late-night janitorial jobs, after the bathrooms were cleaned and the floors waxed and buffed, his duties were merely to sit in an office in a big, empty building, answering the rare phone call and taking messages. He showed me how to look behind the Coke machine in the hallway for change that would spill out of that particular machine. There was always enough for a cold Coke for us both. We would while away the hours in the dark, quiet, empty building, talking and laughing and playing hangman on a sheet of paper; a small boy and his Dad. It’s one of my favorite memories. Despite all the bad, he was still somehow my god.
After he left, and when I had grown older, a rift would grow between us; resentments rising to the surface that a younger me had suppressed, bad memories coming back to haunt, and taking hold. We would not speak for fifteen years.
He asked for me when he was dying, and for my brothers. We travelled out of state to the hospital where he was recovering from the first surgery that had been performed to try to fight the cancer that Kool had spread throughout his body. We stood quietly by his bedside in a darkened room and spoke with this shell of a man whom we had not seen in so many years. Sometimes his speech would be strange and incoherent from the medication, but he knew that we were there, and was glad that we had come.
I would visit him again, before the end. For the first and only time, he would meet my wife and hold our two young Sons. We would step outside for privacy, he and I, and would walk a little way into the warm, quiet summer country darkness, he frail now and almost gone.
We would speak of many things, and of past regrets. We would make an uneasy peace between us. He had decided to stop treatments. He knew that the end was near, and he was tired. He wanted to make peace with me, and with God.
A short while later, he was gone.
As a young Marine, I began to drink heavily at the same age that the bottle that was to destroy his life first took hold of him, never to let go. I was addicted to the hard stuff. When the blackouts started, I remembered what had happened to him, and how a life that was never really lived had been destroyed by it. I backed that shit off. I still drank some after that, but rarely liquor anymore, and I never let it take control. Today I hardly drink at all, just now and then, when a lifetime of accumulated memories becomes a little heavy to bear. My wife (Momma) understands, and doesn’t chide me for the times when I sit outside in the nighttime darkness with a bottle or a glass.
But all that was to come later.
Back then, life was good, and I was excited to see my father. He was back again, from out of state, to the misty hollers, fast-flowing streams, and shrouded mountains and valleys of his and my childhood home.
He had come to Gram and Gramp to visit with my brothers and me, and to ask their permission to have us spend a little time with him at his cousin’s home on Charles Creek, where he would be staying for a couple of days. Although they knew that our Mother would surely not approve, they gave that permission for me alone. The other two were younger, and would stay at home with them. He thanked them, and said that he understood. I was excited to get to go. We had not seen him in nearly two years, and we had missed him. We were children, and clung to the handful of good times, and tried to forget the bad.
I had prayed, after our folks had broken up, to a God in whom I had been taught to believe, for them to get back together, with a child’s naïveté that somehow things would be better this time. Those prayers had gone unanswered, and perhaps had caused me to believe a little less.
But this was better than nothing.
Dad had no vehicle of his own, and had been driven by a neighbor man of the cousin with whom he would be staying for a couple of days.
He was a courtly old gentleman, dressed always in a black suit and a starched white dress shirt minus tie, shoes polished to a gleam. He drove an old behemoth of a car that was ancient even at that time, but which was well-kept, and ran well. Gram and Gramp were delighted to see him, for he was a beloved companion of their youth. I gleaned the impression that he may have at one time courted Gram himself. Many had. Half Cherokee from her Mother, she had been an unusually beautiful woman in her youth. She had chosen Gramp. Through trials and tribulations, as long as I knew them, I never got the impression that she ever regretted her choice.
Old Man Willard was as pleased as they to spend some pleasant time together, catching up on things since they had seen each other last.
He had also, though he hid it well, been drinking, as I was shortly to find out. He carried himself with such a false appearance of sobriety, though, that it was not evident. Had it been, of course, Gram and Gramp would not have let me go.
I was to discover, from Dad, that drunkenness was his usual condition, and that he was rarely sober, though, through long habit and association, he usually carried it well. He had abstained somewhat, at Dad’s gentle request, for this particular occasion. That was not to last.
We left eventually, as the evening grew late. My brothers were disappointed, of course, but Dad assured them that we would return in a couple of days, and he and they would spend some time together. Perhaps, he said, with Gramp’s permission, he could spend the night. Gram and Gramp said that would be fine.
The long ride out on the bad road was a jostling one, but the old car’s suspension handled it well. It was full-on dark when we turned into the paved two-lane State road.
Old Man Willard had started drinking soon after we had left Gram and Gramp, from a bottle he had retrieved from under his seat. Dad, I could tell, hadn’t liked it much, but had kept his peace.
He didn’t keep it much longer.
A few miles passed without much incident, but Willard had been pulling heavily at the bottle, and it was beginning to take effect. He was beginning to swerve a little, and crossed the yellow lines a time or two. Dad could no longer restrain himself.
“Willard, you want me to drive?”
“No, no, Dale, I’ll be all right.” He weaved across the yellow line again.
“I can drive if you want me to, Willard. I don’t mind.”
“It’s all right. I can do it.”
Coming from around a curve, a pair of headlights approached, coming in our direction in the other lane. The lights must have gotten in Willard’s eyes. The old car started drifting left. The two vehicles passed within fourteen inches of each other.
“Jesus!!” Dad yelled, pushing himself back into the seat cushions. I wasn’t sure if he was baspheming, or if he was expecting momentarily to meet his Maker, and had had a sudden last-minute conversion.
“God damn it, Willard!!”
Ok, it was the former. I thought it was some funny shit. I was having a high old time. In the light of the dashboard instruments, it looked to me like Dad was sweating a little bit.
In the near distance, another set of headlights fast approached. The old car drifted left again until it was in the other lane, and we were staring into onrushing oblivion. I stopped laughing. This wasn’t good! A horn sounded a prolonged blast, and we could hear, through the open windows, brakes being stomped on hard.
“Sonofabitch!!” Dad yelled, grabbed the wheel, and managed to abruptly steer us back into our lane without rolling us. We passed the truck with which we had been about to become intimately acquainted to a stream of shouted invective from the bearded head leaning out of its window.
“Willard, pull this motherfucker over! Now!”
The old man finally grumblingly acquiesced, coasting to an uneventful stop on the gravel shoulder. He and Dad switched seats, and we proceeded on. Within minutes, Willard was fast asleep, quietly snoring, his chin in his chest.
Dad had a pretty good gig going at the time. A certain older gentleman, fairly wealthy by the standards of that place and time, had met a certain young woman. He had taken a fancy to her, and she had taken a fancy to his money. Each understanding the parameters of the relationship, she had moved in with him. Her husband had been less than pleased.
His wife’s new boyfriend, among other holdings, owned a number of rental properties up and down the Creek. Some of them were vacant at the moment. Some of the vacant ones began to catch on fire late at night.
Troubled at the pending loss of future income, the wife’s paramour hired Dad and a few others to reside in those that remained intact, with a loaded shotgun at the ready, especially during the nighttime hours. Free living acommodations, groceries provided, and a small salary to sweeten the pot.
Dad’s assigned post happened to be within view of Old Man Willard’s place, and also that of his cousin Drew’s house. He had, at Drew’s wife Lilly’s request, agreed to stay with Drew and keep him company for a couple of days while she was gone. Her sister was sick in bed, and needed her assistance. She didn’t trust Drew, whose domestic ineptitude was the stuff of legend, to either fend for himself or not burn their own house down while she was gone. Besides, she reasoned, Dad could keep an eye on his employer’s property from there.
Dad and Drew had a history of carousing together in their younger days. Many a night if drunken debauchery had occurred in a certain roadhouse just off of the State road.
One particular night had not ended well, when Drew’s natural tendency toward being an asshole had started a fight that did some small damage to some furniture. The State Police had been called, the place falling under their jurisdiction, and the two found themselves cuffed in the back seat of a cruiser, and heading toward a free bed and breakfast at State expense.
That might have been the end of it had Drew chosen to exercise his Constitutional right to remain silent. He instead, in incrementally increasing volume, began to express his dissatisfaction at the situation and to demand redress if this gross injustice to which he was being subjected.
“I ain’ drunk! I want a s’briety test, God damn it!”
“Shut up, hillbilly” from the front seat.
“For the love of God, Drew, will you please shut the fuck up?!” Dad hissed under his breath. He, unlike Drew up to this point, had had interaction with the Staties once before, and had not enjoyed the experience.
Drew would not be dissuaded.
“I ain’ fuckin drunk! I wan’ a ‘brity test, you sonsabitches!” Drew yelled, rearing back, lifting his legs, and kicking at the mesh screen that seperated the front seat from the rear.
“You kick that thing one more time, you cocksucker, you’re gonna be sorry!” from the front seat.
Drew kicked it again, and then a few more times for good measure.
A turn-off loomed ahead, a dirt road heading off of the two-lane. Without another word of warning, the car slowed and turned onto it.
“Oh, shit!” Dad whimpered to Drew. “You’ve done it now.”
As the road meandered down into a wooded stretch, even Drew grew silent as they drove further into the darkness under the trees. Even in his quite inebriated state, he apparently began to realize that maybe he had been a little inconsiderate.
Once well out of sight of the road and the view of any passers-by, the car eased to a stop. The two Troopers got out, and the rear doors opened on both sides. As Dad and a now quiet and apprehensive Drew sat stiffly staring straight ahead, the Trooper on Drew’s side rested his hand in the roof of the cruiser, leaned down and in, and looked down at Drew.
“Now, listen here, you backwoods son of a bitch. If you want a sobriety test, we can give you one right here. Now, are you sure you want one?”
“No, Sir” a chastened Drew answered.
“That’s what I thought. Now you keep your fuckin’ mouth shut. One more word outta you, and I swear to God.......”
The rest of the trip was quiet, and uneventful.
That roadhouse was still in business when we were boys. The preacher got to ranting about it and the evils of drink during one Sunday night’s sermon.
“That place is the den of Satan!” he screamed from the pulpit. “And I know there’s a few in this here congregation that’s been seen at it! If you want to avoid damnation, you best stay the hell away from it!”
Nobody remarked on his choice of words. He was known to slip up now and then.
My brother and I looked at each other and smiled. It seemed like just about every damn thing worth doing, the preacher and the Lord didn’t like. If he was that much against it, it couldn’t help but be a good time. His usual fervent descriptions of an afterlife in Heaven seemed to us pretty boring, truth be told, and hadn’t nobody actually Seen the place. If what was expected of us to get into it was a life of abstinence and self-denial in order to hopefully find tickets waiting for us at the Gate, and we weren’t even sure it was there, it seemed to us like taking a hell of a gamble.
It was after Thanksgiving and before Christmas when Dad and I spent that first night there at Drew’s place. Lilly had made us up some dinners from left-over turkey and dressing and put them in the freezer. She had reminded Drew about his upcoming checkup tomorrow, and that, with her gone, he’d have to drive himself to the Doc. “And make sure you wash your ass before you go, Drew, you nasty bastard!” she had admonished. “He’s gonna check back there, too.”
Dad and Drew had taken out a dinner for each of us for a late supper, and put them in the oven to heat. I guess maybe they didn’t leave them in long enough, or maybe didn’t have the temperature set right, ‘cause they were mostly still frozen. Neither of them seemed to mind, and I was too hungry to give a shit.
Drew got up to go take a leak. Dad took that opportunity to lean in and, in a low voice, tell me about Lilly’s ass-washing remark. “Don’t that beat all?” he asked. “A grown-ass man needin’ to be told to wash his own ass. He sure is a dumb sumbitch” he remarked, breaking off a piece of frozen gravy with his fork and chewing on it.
The next morning broke cold and misty, with a steady light drizzle. Drew was still asleep, and I was in the kitchen looking in the Frigidaire for something to eat for breakfast, when I heard Dad call to me from outside.
I went out to where he was standing in the yard. He nodded toward what he wanted me to see. It was Old Man Willard. It seemed like he’d been hitting the bottle particularly early that morning, or maybe he was just carrying on from the night before. You could tell at a glance that he was none too steady.
A footbridge of sorts spanned the banks of the stream that seperated where he kept his old car parked from his house. It wasn’t anything fancy, just a single log laid across from bank to bank. But it was big enough around that walking across it shouldn’t have proved much of an obstacle, even wet from the misty drizzle.
Not for Willard. Not today. We watched as he made his unsteady way to the near end of the log. With careful consideration, the top of a flask bottle of cheap whiskey sticking out of his suit coat pocket, he stepped gingerly out onto it and began to slowly make his unsteady way across. It began to look like he might actually make it.
Half-way across, he slipped off and fell into the creek. Now, if he had been sober (though he very rarely was), the sensible thing to do would be to pick himself up out of the water and wade the rest of the way across.
But he wasn’t, and he didn’t. He crawled on his hands and knees back up the near bank, stood up, his usually immaculate suit muddy now as well as drenched, and went to give her another try. The log had offended him, and he wasn’t giving up for shit.
He again made it about halfway, and in he went again.
“Shouldn’t we help him?” I asked Dad.
“Naw” he replied. “I’ve tried before. This ain’t the first time. He’d just git mad.”
The third try was just as unsuccessful.
He finally just said “Fuck it”, crawled up the far bank, stood up and straightened his mud-smeared jacket, and staggered into his house.
“Now, that right there” said Dad, “is a sorry sight to see. Let that be a lesson to you, Son” he said, raised the bottle in his hand to his lips, and took a long drink of Four Roses.

This is just my thoughts. Just want to share, learn and possibly get constructive feedback, and I’m fine if no one reads. I have a small position.
I’m not any type of financial advisor or expert in any matter, so do not take this as any kind of financial advice.
GENERAL THOUGHT….
I’m still holding, but I’m not caring about all this post of holder’s vs sellers, for me it’s time to go back to basics.
GME…
When I started to pay attention to GME threads, GME was reported to have 90% of is stores cash flow positive, there were people like Michael Burry investing in, a Microsoft deal, Consoles still having physical disk readers and GME was reinventing itself to be an online retailer, so the squeeze just added an extra incentive for me, the possibility of helping making a difference and for once, have the little guy (us) win over the big guy that does not care about us and most of the time makes our life a gamble of our lives.
Although I saw this happening and from relative low share price, I ended up joining only almost at the peak. I have lost most of my investment. However, I took this as a risky investment and only put in a small portion of my portfolio, conscious that I might lose it.
Currently, since I’m not in any financial danger, I’m able to not sell and look at the recent news, for example, of the hiring of an AWS vet, to add more online experience to the company, as another positive sign that I might get my loss back or even make profits in the long run. With all the above and an already established and recognized name, there is the possibility of a successful pivot and in the long run to have fairly priced stock of a company in the biggest entertainment market/industry in the world. Thus, I will be able to regain the loss in the future instead of just declaring now a loss.
https://news.microsoft.com/2020/10/08/gamestop-announces-multiyear-strategic-partnership-with-microsoft/
you can look up the rest 😉
SQUEEZE….
About the squeeze, I don’t have solid information about one thing or another, so until the 9th of February when more reliable data comes out, this will not affect my position. Why should I sell now if this was started on good fundamentals, I’m already at a loss and the moon-shot data is not out yet?!
https://www.finra.org/filing-reporting/regulatory-filing-systems/short-interest
BB and AMC…
For this I will not go much longer, BB is basically the same as GME, there has been positive news and I don’t considerate to be a loss from what I followed and the price for me is not that bad. AMC however was a purely memento decision, that I probably should not have taken on, but since they are re-opening might as well keep and try to regain what I invested.
CHANGE…
Disclaimer: I’m from Europe, so it is not my country, but I see that, more and more, what happens in the American stock market has the potential of affecting everyone.
It seems that people complaints are scattered, and without focus on specific points, so all the pressure may be dissipated and lost. For me, their needs to be a discussion on what are the major points the average person would like to see changed, and focus on those.
If I had to choose some points, that would transparency and independent regulatory systems.
Transparency should be vertically across the board in wall street. For example, all the big boys should be, in my opinion, obligated to disclose their holdings, long or short, in a monthly or weekly bases. This way we would not have people saying one thing and doing another, everyone would know where each market/stock stands and could make more informed decisions about it, etc.
A transparent regulator, so that for example we do not have situations like the ones described by the RH CEO where they can just use a random number to determine what margin they have to post, and create unpredictable pressure points this way in an unfair manner.
Independent regulators, made not just by insiders, so that there is no bias towards a group or another, that seems not to be the case from the lack of clarity on how they are constituted and described in the video below.
https://youtu.be/4_qxJEsvvSA?t=4801
As I said I have a small position, did not want to expose to much:
2 GME @ 404; 15 BB @ 18; 7 AMC @ 13
I’m also not rich, quite the opposite 😊
Forgive my English, only now starting to be an active member and not just a looker

What is emotional neglect?
In one's childhood, a lack of: everyday caring, non-intrusive and engaged curiosity from parents (or whoever your primary caregivers were, if not your biological parents) about what you were feeling and experiencing, having your feelings reflected back to you (mirrored) in an honest and non-distorting way, time and attention given to you in the form of one-on-one conversation where your feelings and the meaning of those feelings could be freely and openly talked about as needed, protection from harm including protection against adults or other children who tried to hurt you no matter what their relationship was to your parents, warmth and unconditional positive regard for you as a person, appropriate soothing when you were distressed, mature guidance on how to deal with difficult life experiences—and, fundamentally, having parents/caregivers who made an active effort to be emotionally in tune with you as a child. All of these things are vitally necessary for developing into a healthy adult who has a good internal relationship with his or her self and is able to make healthy connections with others. They are not optional luxuries. Far from it, receiving these kinds of nurturing attention are just as important for children as clean water and healthy food.
What forms can emotional neglect take?
The ways in which a child's emotional needs can be neglected are as diverse and varied as the needs themselves. The forms of emotional neglect range from subtle, passive behavior to various forms of overt abuse, making neglect one of the most common forms of child maltreatment. The following list contains just a handful of examples of what neglect can look like.

• Being emotionally unavailable: many parents are inept at or avoid expressing, reacting to, and talking about feelings. This can mean a lack of empathy, putting little or no effort into emotional attunement, not reacting to a child's distress appropriately, or even ignoring signs of a child's distress such as becoming withdrawn, developing addictions or acting out.
  
• Lack of healthy communication: caregivers might not communicate in a healthy way by being absent, invalidating, rejecting, overly or inappropriately critical, and so on. This creates a lack of emotionally meaningful, open conversations, caring curiosity from caregivers about a child's inner life, or a shortness of guidance on how to navigate difficult life experiences. This often happens in combination with unhealthy communication which may show itself in how conflicts are handled poorly, pushed aside or blown up into abusive exchanges.
  
• Parentification: a reversal of roles in which a child has to take on a role of meeting their own parents' emotional needs, or become a caretaker for (typically younger) siblings. This includes a parent verbally unloading furstrations to their child about the perceived flaws of the other parent or other family members.
  
• Obsession with achievement: Some parents put achievements like good grades in school or formal awards above everything else, sometimes even making their love conditional on such achievements. Perfectionist tendencies are another manifestation of this, where parents keep finding reasons to judge their children in a negative light.
  
• Moving to a new home without serious regard for how this could disrupt or break a child's social connections: this forces the child to start over with making friends and forming other relationships outside the family unit, often leaving them to face loneliness, awkwardness or bullying all alone without allies.
  
• Lying: communicates to a child that his or her perceptions, feelings and understanding of their world are so unimportant that manipulating them is okay.
  
• Any form of overt abuse: emotional, verbal, physical, sexual—especially when part of a repeated pattern, constitutes a severe disregard for a child's feelings. This includes insults and other expressions of contempt, manipulation, intimidation, threats and acts of violence.
  

What is (psychological) trauma?
Trauma occurs whenever an emotionally intense experience, whether a single instantaneous event or many episodes happening over a long period of time, especially one caused by someone with a great deal of power over the victim (such as a parent), is too overwhelmingly painful to be processed, forcing the victim to split off from the parts of themselves that experienced distress in order to psychologically survive. The victim then develops various defenses for keeping the pain out of awareness, further warping their personality and stunting their growth.
How does emotional neglect cause trauma?
When we are forced to go without the basic level of nurturing we need during our childhood years, the resulting loneliness and deprivation are overwhelming and devastating. As children we were simply not capable of processing the immense pain of being left out in the cold, so we had no choice but to block out awareness of the pain. This blocking out, or isolating, of parts of our selves is the essence of suffering trauma. A child experiencing ongoing emotional neglect has no choice but to bury a wide variety of feelings and the core passions they arise from: betrayal, hurt, loneliness, longing, bitterness, anger, rage, and depression to name just some of the most significant ones.
What are some common consequences of being neglected as a child?
Pete Walker identifies neglect as the "core wound" in complex PTSD. He writes in Complex PTSD: From Surviving To Thriving,
"Growing up emotionally neglected is like nearly dying of thirst outside the fenced off fountain of a parent's warmth and interest. Emotional neglect makes children feel worthless, unlovable and excruciatingly empty. It leaves them with a hunger that gnaws deeply at the center of their being. They starve for human warmth and comfort."

• Self esteem that is low, fragile or nearly non-existent: all forms of abuse and neglect make a child feel worthless and despondent and lead to self-blame, because when we are totally dependent on our parents we need to believe they are good in order to feel secure. This belief is upheld at the expense of our own boundaries and internal sense of self.
  
• Pervasive sense of shame: a deeply ingrained sense that "I am bad" due to years of parents and caregivers avoiding closeness with us.
  
• Little or no self-compassion: When we are not treated with compassion, it becomes very difficult to learn to have compassion for ourselves, especially in the midst of our own struggles and shortcomings. A lack of self-compassion leads to punishment and harsh criticism of ourselves along with not taking into account the difficulties caused by circumstances outside of our control.
  
• Anxiety: frequent or constant fear and stress with no obvious outside cause, especially in social situations. Without being adequately shown in our childhoods how we belong in the world or being taught how to soothe ourselves we are left with a persistent sense that we are in danger.
  
• Difficulty setting boundaries: Personal boundaries allow us to not make other people's problems our own, to distance ourselves from unfair criticism, and to assert our own rights and interests. When a child's boundaries are regularly invalidated or violated, they can grow up with a heavy sense of guilt about defending or defining themselves as their own separate beings.
  
• Isolation: this can take the form of social withdrawal, having only superficial relationships, or avoiding emotional closeness with others. A lack of emotional connection, empathy, or trust can reinforce isolation since others may perceive us as being distant, aloof, or unavailable. This can in turn worsen our sense of shame, anxiety or under-development of social skills.
  
• Refusing or avoiding help (counter-dependency): difficulty expressing one's needs and asking others for help and support, a tendency to do things by oneself to a degree that is harmful or limits one's growth, and feeling uncomfortable or 'trapped' in close relationships.
  
• Codependency (the 'fawn' response): excessively relying on other people for approval and a sense of identity. This often takes the form of damaging self-sacrifice for the sake of others, putting others' needs above our own, and ignoring or suppressing our own needs.
  
• Cognitive distortions: irrational beliefs and thought patterns that distort our perception. Emotional neglect often leads to cognitive distortions when a child uses their interactions with the very small but highly influential sample of people—their parents—in order to understand how new situations in life will unfold. As a result they can think in ways that, for example, lead to counterdependency ("If I try to rely on other people, I will be a disappointment / be a burden / get rejected.") Other examples of cognitive distortions include personalization ("this went wrong so something must be wrong with me"), over-generalization ("I'll never manage to do it"), or black and white thinking ("I have to do all of it or the whole thing will be a failure [which makes me a failure]"). Cognitive distortions are reinforced by the confirmation bias, our tendency to disregard information that contradicts our beliefs and instead only consider information that confirms them.
  
• Learned helplessness: the conviction that one is unable and powerless to change one's situation. It causes us to accept situations we are dissatisfied with or harmed by, even though there often could be ways to effect change.
  
• Perfectionism: the unconscious belief that having or showing any flaws will make others reject us. Pete Walker describes how perfectionism develops as a defense against feelings of abandonment that threatened to overwhelm us in childhood: "The child projects his hope for being accepted onto inner demands of self-perfection. ... In this way, the child becomes hyperaware of imperfections and strives to become flawless. Eventually she roots out the ultimate flaw–the mortal sin of wanting or asking for her parents' time or energy."
  
• Difficulty with self-discipline: Neglect can leave us with a lack of impulse control or a weak ability to develop and maintain healthy habits. This often causes problems with completing necessary work or ending addictions, which in turn fuels very cruel self-criticism and digs us deeper into the depressive sense that we are defective or worthless. This consequence of emotional neglect calls for an especially tender and caring approach.
  
• Addictions: to mood-altering substances, foods, or activities like working, watching television, sex or gambling. Gabor Maté, a Canadian physician who writes and speaks about the roots of addiction in childhood trauma, describes all addictions as attempts to get an experience of something like intimate connection in a way that feels safe. Addictions also serve to help us escape the ingrained sense that we are unlovable and to suppress emotional pain.
  
• Numbness or detachment: spending many of our most formative years having to constantly avoid intense feelings because we had little or no help processing them creates internal walls between our conscious awareness and those deeper feelings. This leads to depression, especially after childhood ends and we have to function as independent adults.
  
• Inability to talk about feelings (alexithymia): difficulty in identifying, understanding and communicating one's own feelings and emotional aspects of social interactions. It is sometimes described as a sense of emotional numbness or pervasive feelings of emptiness. It is evidenced by intellectualized or avoidant responses to emotion-related questions, by overly externally oriented thinking and by reduced emotional expression, both verbal and nonverbal.
  
• Emptiness: an impoverished relationship with our internal selves which goes along with a general sense that life is pointless or meaningless.
  

What is Complex PTSD?
Complex PTSD (complex post-traumatic stress disorder) is a name for the condition of being stuck with a chronic, prolonged stress response to a series of traumatic experiences which may have happened over a long period of time. The word 'complex' was added to reflect the fact that many people living with unhealed traumas cannot trace their suffering back to a single incident like a car crash or an assault, and to distinguish it from PTSD which is usually associated with a traumatic experience caused by a threat to physical safety. Complex PTSD is more associated with traumatic interpersonal or social experiences (especially during childhood) that do not necessarily involve direct threats to physical safety. While PTSD is listed as a diagnosis in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnositic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Complex PTSD is not. However, Complex PTSD is included in the World Health Organization's 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases.
Some therapists, along with many participants of the /CPTSD subreddit, prefer to drop the word 'disorder' and refer instead to "complex post-traumatic stress" or simply "post-traumatic stress" (CPTS or PTS) to convey an understanding that struggling with the lasting effects of childhood trauma is a consequence of having been traumatized and that experiencing persistent distress does not mean someone is disordered in the sense of being abnormal.
Is emotional neglect (or 'Childhood Emotional Neglect') a diagnosis?
The term "emotional neglect" appears as early as 1913 in English language books. "Childhood Emotional Neglect" (often abbreviated CEN) was popularized by Jonice Webb in her 2012 book Running on Empty. Neither of these terms are formal diagnoses given by psychologists, psychiatrists or medical practitioners. (Childhood) emotional neglect does not refer to a condition that someone could be diagnosed with in the same sense that someone could be diagnosed with diabetes. Rather, "emotional neglect" is emerging as a name generally agreed upon by non-professionals for the deeply harmful absence of attuned caring that is experienced by many people in their childhoods. As a verb phrase (emotionally neglecting) it can also refer to the act of neglecting a person's emotional needs.
My parents were to some extent distant or disengaged with me but in a way that was normal for the culture I grew up in. Was I really neglected?
The basic emotional needs of children are universal among human beings and are therefore not dependent on culture. The specific ways that parents and other caregivers go about meeting those basic needs does of course vary from one cultural context to another and also varies depending upon the individual personalities of parents and caregivers, but the basic needs themselves are the same for everyone. Many cultures around the world are in denial of the fact that children need all the types of caring attention listed in the above answer to "What is emotional neglect?" This is partly because in so many cultures it is normal—quite often expected and demanded—to avoid the pain of examining one's childhood traumas and to pretend that one is a fully mature, healthy adult with no serious wounds or difficulty functioning in society.
The important question is not about what your parent(s) did right or wrong, or whether they were normal or abnormal as judged by their adult peers. The important question is about what you personally experienced as a child and whether or not you got all the care you needed in order to grow up with a healthy sense of self and a good relationship with your feelings. Ultimately, nobody other than yourself can answer this question for you.
My parents may not have given me all the emotional nurturing I needed, but I believe they did the best they could. Can I really blame them for what they didn't do?
Yes. You can blame someone for hurting you whether they hurt you by a malicious act that was done intentionally or by the most accidental oversight made out of pure ignorance. This is especially true if you were hurt in a way that profoundly changed your life for the worse.
Assigning blame is not at all the same as blindly hating or holding an inappropriate grudge against someone. To the extent that a person is honest, cares about treating others fairly and wants to maintain good relationships, they can accept appropriate blame for hurting others and will try to make amends and change their behavior accordingly. However, feeling the anger involved in appropriate, non-abusive and constructive blame is not easy.
Should I confront my parents/caregivers about how they neglected me?
Confronting the people who were supposed to nurture you in your childhood has the potential to be very rewarding, as it can prompt them to confirm the reality of painful experiences you had been keeping inside for a long time or even lead to a long overdue apology. However it also carries some big emotional risks. Even if they are intellectually and emotionally capable of understanding the concept and how it applies to their parenting, a parent who emotionally neglected their child has a strong incentive to continue ignoring or denying the actual effects of their parenting choices: acknowledging the truth about such things is often very painful. Taking the step of being vulnerable in talking about how the neglect affected you and being met with denial can reopen childhood wounds in a major way. In many cases there is a risk of being rejected or even retaliated against for challenging a family narrative of happy, untroubled childhoods.
If you are considering confronting (or even simply questioning) a parent or caregiver about how they affected you, it is well advised to make sure you are confronting them from a place of being firmly on your own side and not out of desperation to get the love you did not receive as a child. Building up this level of self-assured confidence can take a great deal of time and effort for someone who was emotionally neglected. There is no shame in avoiding confrontation if the risks seem to outweigh the potential benefits; avoiding a confrontation does not make your traumatic experiences any less real or important.
How can I heal from this? What does it look like to get better?
While there is no neatly itemized list of steps to heal from childhood trauma, the process of healing is, at its core, all about discovering and reconnecting with one's early life experiences and eventually grieving—processing, or feeling through—all the painful losses, deprivations and violations which as a child you had no choice but to bury in your unconscious. This goes hand in hand with reparenting: fulfilling our developmental needs that were not met in our childhoods.
Some techniques that are useful toward this end include

• journaling: carrying on a written conversation with yourself about your life—past, present and future;
  
• any other form of self-expression (drawing, painting, singing, dancing, building, volunteering, ...) that accesses or brings up feelings;
  
• taking good physical care of your body;
  
• developing habits around being aware of what you're feeling and being kind to yourself;
  
• making friends who share your values;
  
• structuring your everyday life so as to keep your stress level low;
  
• reading literature (fiction or non-fiction) or experiencing art that tells truths about important human experiences;
  
• investigating the history of your family and its social context;
  
• connecting with trusted others and sharing thoughts and feelings about the healing process or about life in general.
  

You are invited to take part in the worldwide collaborative process of figuring out how to heal from childhood trauma and to grow more effectively, some of which is happening every day on EmotionalNeglect. We are all learning how to do this as we go along—sometimes quite clumsily in wavering, uneven steps.
Where can I read more?
See the sidebar of EmotionalNeglect for several good articles and books relevant to understanding and healing from neglect. Our community library thread also contains a growing collection of literature. And of course this subreddit as a whole, as well as CPTSD, has many threads full of great comments and discussions.

Just finished my run, non-aligned path. Free Market Economy Approach, Privatizing, Education, Unity Goal.
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Ran on free market economics, reforming the constitution, improve education, forgot the rest.
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i danced to the tune of Oligarchs, but refused the bribes up until Koronti with the media. Lucian and your economic advisor advise you want the media on your side. Its almost unnoticeable after you agree to Koronti's terms. He came back around to collect during the privatizing/nationalization of the Big Four, i gave him, not Tusk(i was planning the long game with the Oligarchs hard), i was anti-Oligarch for the first four turns, didn't support business bailout, pro populace, i veered USP off their normal platform. economic development dropped, suffered black tuesday, budget in -5...i honestly went with my personal thoughts on most of the decisions.
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survived the spy scandal, but loss my VP to suicide, denied Lucian his shot at VP, picked Tory, pushed for my wife's goals all the way, and defended them in the face of the archpriest and the mayor. Played devil's advocate with Wehlen, got deal but at the expense of going against my policies for relaxed borders, appeasing my military. most of the departments got a boost in funding at the expense of my budget. gambled on acarsia's stock. paid off lightly.
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didn't get any other trade deals after. i basically refused to acknowlege the land grab. Bludish rights were not fully implemented, but restored unity within, education improved greatly, women's rights granted and acknowledged, worker's act signed, smacked the chairmans of the business groups verbally for giving me rumors...personal choice there.
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Cracked at the end, joined ATO, gave a neutral but peaceful approach in speech at the AN, highlighting Rumberg's increasing aggression. I had already beefed up the military, but joining ATO, gave me much more in military and support. my ED went from 1 to 5, balanced my budget to 0 with the next three acts for taxes. brought myself economically back to square one, but we had avoided the depression. Lost my department of interior secretary, since i was intentionally steering away from Soll's policies and allied with the Justice Party, signaling for more reform and changes to come. Bested her for party leadership, didn't attack her.
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Oh...i forgot that i bested the Supreme Court and got a landslide win in the Assembly prior to besting the Court . Concessions had to be made with Tory and the conservatives, but it paid off clearly at the party leadership vote for the second election.
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This game...drains..i had to take breaks on each turn...cause you just feel like you're unsure and the suspense created at any point made me anxious.
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Won second election, no assassination. Soll tipped his hat at me in a military parade. So..didn't see him afterwards. My Top Diplomat retired due to old age...damn shame honestly...i wanted to see what happened for the second term.

So the Hazbin Hotel team confirmed the presence of seven circles in hell, each representing one of the seven deadly sins. For now only two have been shown/nominated, the circle of pride, where the sinners souls reside and the circle of greed, where Loo Loo Land is. Since Lucifer and Mammon have been said to be the rulers of the respective circles we can expect the Hell of the HHU (Hazbin Hotel Universe) to follow the classical hierarchy of the seven princes, each ruling one of these circles. I have decided to bring out my knowledge on Demonology to present to you a bit of infos regarding the demons associated with each sin, to help with theories, OCs or simply for anyone that wants more clarity on demons that have appeared or might appear in the show. Because I study history and not necromancy an important portion of this post will regard the historical origins of each demon (who are just as interesting as the demon itself, trust me). The list changes from source to source, so I will present the demons that I understand being the most well recognized in each position, at the end I will put a little description of two other demons that have been named in similar hierarchies.
Pride > Lucifer. Lucifer Morningstar, the bringer of light, the angel of betrayal, ruler of Hell. Lucifer is the most well known of all demons, and is regarded as the angel that rebelled to God and was thrown out of from heaven. The crime is different from source to source, but always involves hubris, either he refused to bow down to humanity, considering himself to be superior to them, or he wanted to dethrone god (or, in Paradise Lost, because he was jealous of Jesus). Lucifer is represented either as stunningly beautiful, having retained its angelic beauty, or as an horrifying monster that sometimes had a face on its ass. Neither would be true, since as a Cherubim Lucifer should have four wings, two of which hide its body, four heads, one human, one of a lion, one of a bull and one of an eagle, and goat hooves.
Lucifer in the HHU appears to have its traditional backstory of the fallen angel, plus considering the way it is dressed he also cover the role of the snake that tempted Eve (we’ll discuss about him later). While he is called only an overlord instead of the ruler of hell, he possess great power and authority, being considered the most powerful demon in Hell since he seems to have retained some of its angelic powers. Lucifer in the HHU has also married Lilith, a figure in Hebrew mythology who is said to be the first woman. God made her from mud in the same way as Adam, when she was told she had to submit to Adam and "be on the bottom" she refused , wanting instead to be treated equally. Her rebellion caused her to become a demon, and it is said she sired thousands of childrens with the demons of the desert.
Wrath > Satan. Satan, in many demonic hierarchies and list of demons a separate entity from Lucifer. Satan is referred as the snake that tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and is usually portrayed as an hideous creature more than Lucifer himself. Satan is Lucifer in the end, both because they lack a backstory that differ from one another, but also because they were created in the same way.
Satan in the HHU hasn’t appeared, and while it has been confirmed he is a separate character from Lucifer we still know nothing about him.
Historically speaking neither Satan nor Lucifer exist. They were created from the figure of the angel Samael ("the poison of god") who was called "satan" in Hebrew, a generic term that means "adversary". Satan is used in the Bible many times to refer to humans, demons and angels. Samael had the job of being the adversary of humankind on behalf of God, testing their faith by opposing them. He is the angel that asked Abhram to sacrifice his son Isaac, that ruined the life of Job and wrestled with Jacob for an entire night.
The misunderstanding then came because of Isaiah 14:12, a passage originally talking of a Mesopotamian king who had fell out of grace, referred ironically with its title hêlêl, which means light of God or bringer of light. The Greeks translated it in phosphorus, and when it was translated in Latin it became Lucifer, except that someone put the capital letter at the beginning of it, transforming it into a name instead of an adjective, creating the fallen Lucifer. After that the Christian doctrine absorbed this new figure and fused him with the angel that tested humankind and with the snake that tempted Eve. The snake itself was not supposed to be an evil spirit, but simply a trickster. The serpent itself in near-east culture was a symbol of fertility and rebirth, but is disputed what he represent, with the most creditable theory being a metaphor for sexual desires, being a metaphor for the loss of purity (with the exchange of the apple being a metaphor for Sex) dehumanized as much as possible.
Only later demonologist split Lucifer and Satan in two characters, leaving Lucifer with the traits of the rebellious angel and using Satan as the incarnation of the negative inclinations and instincts inside of humans. The hooves of its Cherubim form would then also be used to associate and demonize pagan wild gods such as Cernunnos and Pan, using them to create the image of the classic devil as we know it, with goat hooves, horns, usually naked and with a visible erection (since these gods were also gods of fertility and sex).
Gluttony > Beelzebub. In some of the oldest texts, Beelzebub is put as the ruler of hell and all demons. Beelzebub is referred as “Lord of the Flies”, and while he doesn’t make children go insane and murder each other’s, he does incite men to all manner of sin, most importantly he causes men to pray to false gods, and is represented as a giant (and in my opinion metal as Hell) fly. According to many exorcists and demonologists Beelzebub managed to overthrow Satan as the ruler of hell, founding the order of the Knights of the Fly. According to Jacques Deplancy Beelzebub become the ruler of Hell, instituting a constitutional monarchy, leaving Satan to become the chief of the political opposition, creating both a House of the Lords and a Ministry of Justice, where Lucifer acts as the chief of (in)justice, with Alastor as its executioner.
Beelzebub is a political demon, created by demonizing the main god of the Canaanite people, Baal. Baal means “Lord” in the canaanite language, and is used to refer to multiple deities, but particularly to the god Hadad. The Canaanites and the Hebrews went many times to war, and because they worshipped different divinities from what they believed being “the true one”, they called the other False God and insulted their followrs. The name Beelzebub comes from the term Baal ‘al Zeebub, which means “Lord of the Flies”, used to insult Baal by calling him a pile of shit, and its followers flies. This is also why the most ancient texts put Beelzebub as the ruler of Hell, since their main enemy were the followers of Baal they saw them as demons, and him as their chief.
Lust > Asmodeus. Asmodeus is probably the most well known demon beside the triad that I already named. Asmodeus is a demon of lechery and hedonism, and encourages gambling. He is called the worst of demons, the husband of Lilith, and the king of all jinns. Asmodeus is seen with many traits, but mostly as a creature with three heads, one of a ram, one of a bull and one of a human. Asmodeus commands an army of demons, and Solomon actually once tricked him into creating the Temple of Jerusalem, even if sometimes the act is attributed to Baalzebub, controlled by Solomon with his ring.
The name Asmodai is believed to come from aēšma-daēva, from the ancient Avestan language (a proto-Iranian language connected with the Zoroastrian religion), meaning “demon of wrath”. The figure of aēṣ̌ma (or Aeshma) is well recognized as the demon of wrath in Zoroastian, and while the addition of the component daēva to the name is redundant and not attested, it does exist in both Zoroastrian and Middle Persian, so it is entirely possible.
The frequent use of Asmodai as an evil spirit in Semitic folklore is actually very important for the scholars since it proves the influence Persian Zoroastrian beliefs had on Judaic theology and mythology. Also u/The-J-Man141 made an fantastic OC of Asmodeus, and I am going to be deeply disappointed when it will looks different in the show.
Envy > Leviathan. The leviathan is known as a giant marine creature, a giant and powerful monster that will emerge from the sea during the Last Judgment to devour the souls of the damned. In the meantime, he endangers God’s creation by threatening with the rising of the waters. The Leviathan is supposed to be one of three mighty beasts, the others being the Behemoth and the bird Ziz.
In the HHU a character by the name of Seviathan von Eldritch has been mentioned. He is a noble demon and the ex of Charlie. We still don’t know enough about him to confirm whether he is the only reference to the serpent or not.
Leviathan is the dragon of Semitic cultures. The Leviathan is the incarnation of marine storms and chaos, and is recognized as the sea-serpent Lotan, servant of the sea god Yam, killed by the father god Baal Hadad. This act represent how the god bested the forces of chaos and nature and became ruler of the world, which is also reflected in the way Yahweh defeats the Leviathan in Isaiah 27:1. All cultures and ancient religions possess a snake-like creatures, monsters or god, roles spanning from symbols of fertility, to incarnations of the most destructive forces of nature and chaos. The reasons of which are disputed, the most reasonable one ties them with an innate primordial fear of snakes and reptiles, inheritance of our ancestors mammals, the other is the discovery and misinterpretations of dinosaur fossils isby ancient cultures, although their influence in the Palestinian area is disputable.
Greed > Mammon. Mammon is a demon of wealth and greed, often taking the place of Treasurer of Hell (and ambassador of England in its spare time). There aren’t many depictions of this demon, but is seen as a man that holds a purse full of gold, tempting men with material wealth.
While Mammon has not appeared in the HHU he seems to own both Robo Fizz and Loo Loo land, and seems to be in charge of Hell’s bank, since his face appears on moneys. The face that appears on moneys and at the end its signature suggest that he looks like a jester, and that both Fizzaroli and Robo Fizz have been inspired from him.
Mammon has a simple history, with his name being the Hebrew word for Money and Wealth. In the bible and other texts he is personified many times, most famous is the phrase “You can’t worship both God and Mammon”. He is a metaphorical “false god”, being a representation of the evil that is caused by “worshiping” money and wealth. Basically Jeff Bezos is a disciple of Mammon.
Sloth > Belphegor. Belphegor is a demon that suggest to humans ideas for inventions that will make them rich, and corrupts men by promising them wealth. While he is represented very little, in the Dictionnaire Infernal he is depicted as being on a toilet, with the expression of someone that didn’t ate light the last evening. He is also said to be the ambassador of France.
Belphegor name comes from a Moabite god, also called Baal because as I said it just means “lord”, associated with an event of heresy known as the heresy of Baal Peor, described in likely biased details in Numbers 25:1–15. He was apparently worshiped as a phallus and its cult involved orgies. It is not clear why he gained such importance to become one of the princes of Hell.
Astaroth. In the Lanterne of Light the demon Astaroth takes the role of Prince of Pride. Astaroth is a Great Duke of hell that rides a mighty dragon. Often paired with Beelzebub and Lucifer in an evil trinity that opposes the holy trinity. He possess a possibly poisonus breath, and is said to seduce men by making them lazy, doubt themselves and by making them overthink. If a conjurer manages to bind him, he teaches mathemathical sciences and handicrafts, he also has power over snakes and everything unseen. According to Jacques Deplancy he is the treasurer of Hell and a Knight of the Fly.
Astaroth comes from the goddess Astarte, the Phoenician goddess of fertility and war, written as Astoreth in the Bible. Fun fact, Astarte is the Hellenized form of the Babylonian goddess of love, war, fertility and magic Ishtar. Also also som Phoenician merchants brought her cult to Greece, and the Spartans liked her so much they started worshipping her, calling her Aphrodite, the Athenians then stripped the aspect of warrior goddess.
Abadon. In the Lanterne of Light the demon Abadon takes the role of Prince of Sloth. Abadon is said to be the Archangel of the Bottomless Pit. He controls an army of monstrous locusts that will rise during the Apocalypse. In Greek he is called Apollyon, while in latin its name is Exterminans. Abadon is often put in contraposition to Sheol, a realm of shadows where the souls of the dead reside, also used as another name from Hell, suggesting either that either he is himself a realm of destruction or destruction itself. He has also been called the angel Muriel, who performs his destruction on God’s behalf, and will bring the souls of humanity to the location of the last Judgment.
Abaddon comes from the verb ’ăḇāḏ, which means “destruction”. It’s used many times and probably has the same origin as Mammon, where a word is personified so many times that is then taken as an individual entity, or in its case as a place of pure destruction. It is one of the most confusing demons, and the lack of informations we have on him doesn't really help.
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