Not sure about either way. One thing did look interesting to me: the messages when trying to buy/ short the stock on Schwab looked strange. This might be indicative that they did not have a suitable system in place to interfere with the trading so drastically?

Initially it would say the stock ticket is wrong then after trying a few minutes later I trying short selling it would say the margins are not met (however I had more than 1000% margins) and finally it said the trading is restricted because of high volatility.

That's pretty weird. It sounds like something that had to be improvised on their end.

It does seem like there was some outside intervention:

- Multiple brokerages making these types of decisions, not just one

- Brokerages appearing to improvise (i.e. looking strange, maybe not tested out much beforehand) technical ways to send this new message

- Brokerage messaging and decision-making policy appearing to be volatile by itself (!)

- Claims (nothing substantiated) that e.g. government heads were involved in making the call

These factors seem to add up, so it's interesting to watch this unfold.

It might help the defense but ultimately the percentage of GameStop’s stock that is traded/held on RobinHood is very high (it is most of the market) and restricting trades on the platform is likely to cause serious losses to their customers. All the ingredients of a securities fraud case are present and the company stands to lose its entire business over the lawsuit.