I have a general, all-purpose opposition to financial trading that’s about exploiting weird market structure tricks to screw people over rather than expressing beliefs about the value of the underlying things being traded. Institutional traders too often get away with doing that kind of thing, and I’m hardly losing sleep over the particular targets of this campaign, but we can’t let the takeaway here be “it’s fine as long as retail investors get to play too”.
The issue with that argument is that it's really not “it’s fine as long as retail investors get to play too," it's “it’s fine until retail investors get to play too”
The point is that it's not fine. The institutional investors who have historically said it was fine were wrong. If the average retail investor comes away thinking scummy tactics are cool now that you and I can use them, it'll be a disaster for the cause of real financial reform.
It's hypocritical to only now be concerned with "scummy tactics" when the little people found a way to turn them on the big money. No one seemed to really care until hedge funds started losing billions due to a situation they created.
I'm just not sure what to tell you here. I'm not gonna support unethical trading practices because other people might have hypocritical reasons to oppose them. Again, it's not just this one event; I really am worried that the SEC will be unable to implement market reforms here because Robinhood traders argue it's their turn to exploit the system.
