I have a bit of knowledge from friends who work in fintech, and the sentiment among fintech companies seems to be that SEC doesn't matter. The fine is small and comes way too late. You can simply account for an approximate future fine and move forward with your shady business.
This will probably be my least popular post ever, but the explanation needs to get out there for why Robinhood stopped trading on GME.
Selling a stock short is NOT illegal. It is a perfectly valid type of investment according to the SEC:
“D. Are short sales legal?
Although the vast majority of short sales are legal, abusive short sale practices are illegal. For example, it is prohibited for any person to engage in a series of transactions in order to create actual or apparent active trading in a security or to depress the price of a security for the purpose of inducing the purchase or sale of the security by others. Thus, short sales effected to manipulate the price of a stock are prohibited.”
Basically – you can’t short sell a stock to manipulate the price down so you can buy a lot more of it later. If you believe a stock is overpriced and short sell it, that is legal. That is exactly what tons of retail traders and hedge funds do every day, including on Gamestop.
On the other hand, manipulating a stock price upwards to cause a short squeeze IS illegal according to the same SEC article:
“Although some short squeezes may occur naturally in the market, a scheme to manipulate the price or availability of stock in order to cause a short squeeze is illegal.”
Unprecedented numbers of people on Reddit, Twitter, and elsewhere collaborated to intentionally create a short squeeze on GME in the last week. No one talked about a fundamental case why Gamestop the company was worth a lot of money and would be successful in the future; instead everyone made the argument that due to a very high short interest of 100%+, that a short squeeze would send the price “to the moon”. That is illegal according to the SEC.
Multiple brokerages, especially Robinhood, probably had their attorneys tell them that “Hey, you are aiding and abetting illegal activity by enabling a short squeeze and could be liable criminally or civilly if you continue to allow this blatant illegal activity on your platform”. So they decided to stop it by only allowing people to close their positions rather than open new ones in support of the short squeeze.
Another strong reason is that if the short squeeze caused the GME stock to go to 5000 in a sudden leap, tons of traders (both retail and professional) could instantly go broke, and then the brokerage (Robinhood) would be left holding the bag. For example, picture a retail investor with a Robinhood account had sold call options in the amount of $100,000 and their account was worth $200,000. If the price gapped from 300 to 5000 and those options were exercised, that trader could have a loss of $10,000,000. He would lose the value of his account, $200,000… but the brokerage would have to make up the rest of the settlement and take a loss of $9,800,000. Now multiply that by thousands of accounts…. no brokerage wants to take the risk of being bankrupted, so they shut it down.
The two strong reasons Robinhood and other brokers stopped trading was to prevent legal liability from enabling illegal activity on their platform, and for wanting to avoid potentially massive banktuptcy from traders unable to cover their losses.
Wrong. The bull case was made for GME as far back as late 2019, and it gained momentum this year.
Nothing different than Jim Cramer talking up a stock on CNBC every fucking night.
Edit: I know this because I watched a youtube video from a popular redditor named deepfuckingvalue a few weeks ago and bought into the thesis fully as a value investment. He goes under the name RoaringKitty on youtube.
I lost multiple years worth of salary this morning when RobinHood decided to stop selling GME.
> Wrong. The bull case was made for GME as far back as late 2019, and it gained momentum this year.
That argument was made last year and early this year. The argument this week has been that the stock price will increase specifically because of a short squeeze, and the popular comment on WSB has been that buying and/or holding GME stock is a rebellious act that will cause that short squeeze to happen.
If deliberately causing a short squeeze constitutes illegal market manipulation, then at least some of the WSB comments advocate for going over that line. On the other hand, the SEC would probably have its hands full linking these comments to actual trades that were meaningful enough to move the stock price -- SEC rules aren't written with a horde of enraged small-dollar investors in mind as the culprits.
Notice that RoaringKitty has taken profits from his GME holdings over the past few weeks, most recently about two days ago, and has not continued buying into the stock.
> I lost multiple years worth of salary this morning when RobinHood decided to stop selling GME.
With all due respect, GME has been a highly speculative play for at least this entire week. It's not a good idea to speculate with money that you can't afford to lose.
So what? I know it's a highly speculative move. I know it's absurd to buy this stock at this price. But we should be allowed to. (Obviously not on margin).
I don't really think the market should allow for this sort of thing. I agree with you there. But that's how the rules are written, and now when the little guy figures out the rules they shut it down.
GME is trading at between 4x and 8x it's all time high in 2008. The graph of the stock price basically looks like a flat line until a few days ago where it dramatically spiked to far, far more than it's previous peak.
Are you saying that GME will actually be worth it's current stock price a year from now? Why is that?
I am sorry to hear about your losses, but that does not disprove my explanation. I also am a member of WSB and read all the top posts. I think most of them make the argument to hold the position as a short squeeze is coming, and very few of them argue the stock is truly worth a ton of money. Very few people actually believe a company that sells video games the same way Blockbuster sold movies has a lot of potential.
That absolutely disproves your explanation. You said nobody was making a case for GameStop being a good stock, and the other comment pointed out that the single most popular name associated with this trade has been doing exactly that.
You also quoted the SEC saying that manipulating a stock price to cause a short squeeze is illegal but also that short squeezes occur naturally. Expecting a short squeeze and intending to profit off of it is not illegal.
You make the point that some people on wallstreetbets made comments that crossed the line on manipulation. I'm sure that's true, but if you see a few problematic comments out of millions it's obviously absurd to say that a stock mustn't be bought because of them.
Ironically, you are criticizing what is clearly not manipulation (valuing GME highly and expecting to profit off of a coming short squeeze) in order to defend what clearly is manipulation (banning a million retail investors from taking one side of a trade at a critical moment).
I'm not a member of WSB, and I don't follow their forum. Having done an independent analysis and deciding that it is potentially a good (but risky) move for me, why am I not allowed to trade GME? I can trade any other stock this way.
> For example, picture a retail investor with a Robinhood account had sold call options in the amount of $100,000 and their account was worth $200,000. If the price gapped from 300 to 5000 and those options were exercised, that trader could have a loss of $10,000,000. He would lose the value of his account, $200,000… but the brokerage would have to make up the rest of the settlement and take a loss of $9,800,000. Now multiply that by thousands of accounts…. no brokerage wants to take the risk of being bankrupted, so they shut it down.
That's why every brokerage has a risk department. If you're a brokerage and you let thousands of customers write uncovered GME calls, you deserve to lose all your money and go out of business. Simple as that.
Brokerages do not have a fiduciary duty to prevent customers from losing their money in bad trades. It's one thing to shut down margin trading or even possibly options purchases, but to not allow people to buy a stock with their own money is pretty bad. There is zero risk to the brokerage there.
um, buying stocks is not a scheme to manipulate the price. However disabling purchases of a stock for millions of users does artificially suppress demand.
Also robinhood doesn't allow selling naked options so that entire point of yours is moot.
Interactive Brokers does allow naked selling of options, and also shut down trading probably for similar reasons. Robinhood could lose money in any number of ways if a stock gaps and some of it's customers go bankrupt.
If you buy or sell stocks with the intent to manipulate the price (either through a pump and dump scheme, or a short squeeze scheme) that is illegal. It doesn't matter whether the action is only buying or only selling. It is the intent.
Well I think probably most of the people on wsb have no idea what they're doing, those that trade on margin are extremely reckless and irrational. Having said that I still find absolutely ridiculous and highly corrupt that they solely stopped buy orders. If you stop trading that's reasonable, but to cap this off on one side and allow Wallstreet to make up for losses is unacceptable.
Robinhood's platform was allowing illegal activity - many people had come out publicly [0] saying they were attempting a short squeeze on GME which is illegal. Robinhood is extremely vulnerable to lawsuits for enabling that activity if they did not take action.
Assuming this is all true, it still just feels like they're picking winners, which is probably the thing that's going to matter more than anything else going forward. People can and will point to a laundry list of rules violations by institutional investors (is a 140% short of a stock completely and unambiguously within the rules?) that show the hypocrisy of the little guy getting screwed.
They aren't picking winners, they are avoiding lawsuits for allowing illegal activity on their platform. Short squeezes are illegal. You can see people collaborating all over WSB to create short squeezes, most frequently using the Robinhood app.
You keep repeating that short squeezes are illegal but that's not true. Manipulating prices to cause a short squeeze is illegal, but that's not what happened here. Some people bought GME because they liked the stock. Others bought because they thought a short squeeze was coming.
If I think the price is going up and buy, that's legal. If I manipulate the price to go up after I buy, that's illegal. It's the same thing.
> If the price gapped from 300 to 5000 and those options were exercised, that trader could have a loss of $10,000,000. He would lose the value of his account, $200,000… but the brokerage would have to make up the rest of the settlement and take a loss of $9,800,000.
What if the price of a stock went from $300 to $5000 for legitimate reasons, perhaps due to some technological breakthrough. The exact same situation would happen. Would shutting down trading also be justified?
