Robinhood is what all the people jumping on the bandwagon used. And this coincided with a sharp price drop on all of these stocks blocked. The reason was "Due to ongoing volatility", but any trader will tell you volatility is how money is made. It took all of the normal people out of the game, and tried to scare them into selling so that the ones holding the shorts are in a better position.

And to add to that, a company (Citadel) that pays Robinhood a large amount of money for their data is one of those with the short positions. So Robinhood itself has a stake in this.

Disclaimer: I have no idea what I am talking about and this is only my opinion.

> And to add to that, a company (Citadel) that pays Robinhood a large amount of money for their data is one of those with the short positions. So Robinhood itself has a stake in this.

That’s quite a claim. Got a source on that?

Again I have no idea what I'm talking about, but

https://www.equities.com/news/robinhood-is-said-to-get-40-re...

https://twitter.com/justinkan/status/1354853920762253315

I'm no market expert, but I know that when cash is flowing between two companies, they generally have shared interests.

I've been buying on TDA and Schwab today... I think that TDA only restricts you if you are on a margin account.

I'm on a cash account because I like to avoid their "pattern day trader" protection.

Could someone please confirm this, but as I understand they blocked buys but not sells, or the other way around? Instead of freezing the stock, it drives the price in one direction.

Correct. They blocked buys which would drive the price down, benefitting Citadel, their main source of revenue. I don’t know if that’s why they did this but that’s what the lawsuit is for: to find out. At worst, Robinhood is going to close because of this and their and Citadel’s execs might face prison for manipulating the market.

Thanks for confirming! What happens if this kind of thing happens due to an unintentional bug? Do execs go to jail for market manipulation?

Not a lawyer, but I imagine it’s similar to how industrial accidents are treated. If there was proper due diligence and precautions, and it was truly an “act of God” sort of thing, that’s understandable. If on the other hand their processes are not up to snuff and they moved a bit too fast and broke one too many things, I imagine they wouldn’t be treated as nicely.

Vanguard hasn’t. Fidelity hasn’t. TD Ameritrade hasn’t (other than not allowing margin for shorts). I disn’t check Schwab but I don’t think they blocked purchases either.

Many trading platforms still allow trading. And there's no real reason not to, except to protect the hedge funds that fucked up.

Edit: And I just found out my platform (Binck) doesn't accept trades anymore.

Edit: Apparently they do accept trades, but only if your limit is close to the current price. I was increasing mine because it wasn't executing at the lower price. Eventually I did get in at the lower price. We'll see where this goes.

Robinhood was the first.

DeGiro is still good. Bought GME there today.

I also use DEGIRO, and it is a good broker, it doesn't do this scammy pay for order flow thing that Robinhood and Trade republic are doing, that said, I didn't buy GME and I would not recommend buying it.

It is super risky, but there's a definite path to profit here: the short-sellers sold too much stock. 140% of the shares, it appears, which means shares were borrowed, sold, and then borrowed from the buyer it was sold to and sold again. And when all those shorts run out, the short-sellers need to have bought shares back again. With share prices this high, they're going to have to pay a lot of money for them, and people holding shares could make a ton of profit.

But it's definitely risky. You could lose a lot of money. Many of the people buying are also doing it to stick it to the hedge funds and give them a taste of their own medicine.

> Virtually all trading platforms have blocked users from opening positions on these symbols.

Can you be more specific? Robinhood & Webull are the only two that I'm aware of.

TD Ameritrade is preventing me from opening positions right now.

TD Canada has prevented some forms of orders (e.g. market buy), but not limit buy - I think this isn't so bad as their clients might expect the quoted price and get screwed at open because of volatility

Ally was as well (I am not sure who fills the orders), but Fidelity was still working for me.

tastyworks went to close-only @ 11:39AM per an email, and opened it back up at 3:12PM today. They blamed Apex clearing, which is the custodian for tastyworks accounts.

212 did this aswell.

Tastyworks also blocked opening new positions.

blocking options calls from account that can't cover the position: good, probably saved people from getting into debt

blocking purchases of shares from accounts that have enough to cover the contract: highly sketchy and worthy of deep scrutiny

some broker did 1, some did 2, but form screenshots alone is hard to tell which did which

>Why is Robinhood being singled out?

Likely because it has the most impacted users. I suspect other platforms will get lawsuits as well in time if this one proceeds.

I am so curious what the long term plan for GME is. Is it to hold the long term? If it’s not, what are the plans to unwind?

This is the "buy high sell never" part of the meme.

Imagine there are only two shares GME.

You buy two GME for $1ea. Two short sellers needs 1 GME each lest they hemorrhage money on fees. You loudly announce your plan to hold half your GME forever. The short sellers trip over each other to pay you stupid money for the one GME you are selling. You then sit on the other GME for awhile, maybe sell it in a year or two for a buck. In any case despite buying two and selling one you've made a ton of profit.

Now scale this up to several million people.

> Now scale this up to several million people.

And many more shares, most of them hold by corporate and institutions (some of those institutions will be happy to lend shares as well). Also more shares can be issued.

My understanding is the long term plan is to try and bankrupt some hedge funds or drive the SEC/regulatory bodies to enforce rules against the elite class of investors; its not entirely about profit for everyone.

There's so much discussion on HackerNews today about people who are going to lose out on these stocks where I've seen a healthy amount of comments on Reddit in the last week of people buying stock merely "for the lulz". I think there's a non-insignificant amount of "investors" who have tossed paltry sums at $GME with no plans on making a return.

Honestly, I'd have done the same, but I don't do any form of stock trading so I don't have accounts on any platforms to do it. I've done the same with various crypto shitcoins and made a few bucks off throwing $50 or $100 at something I don't expect to ever see return on too.

I am curious what the average holding is for GME. $100 * 2 million WSB subscribers is $200m to make a stock go to $24b market cap. That isn’t a lot of cash. People are posting screenshots with $10k+ holdings on WSB. Monday volume indicates a massive amount of stock movement.

At some point those shorts are due - if the owner of the shorts doesn't hold the necessary stocks, it's going to be expensive.

That's my understanding. What happens afterwards? No ideas. Some people want to see hedge funds burn, I would not mind that either.

Short sales do not work like that. You can have a short position indefinitely, as long as you pay the margin interest and meet the margin maintenance requirements. Options positions are another story, in-the-money calls do require delivery of the shares by the expiration date, and next such date is tomorrow.

Nobody is going to make the hedge funds burn. At this point the hedge funds are fleecing whoever was buying shares or options yesterday (who do you think they bought them from?).

Exactly, “wall st” as a whole is making bank off this volatility, as well as Blackrock and Fidelity finds. The real way to actually stick it to wall st would be if all of main st sold all their equities..

Thanks for teaching me something I did not know! May the post above be forever a monument to my ignorance!

shirt sellers borrow stock, then sell it. when the shirt is up, they are required to buy new stock and return the borrowed shares.

if the stock price is higher when they borrow and sell, and lower when they buy and return, they make a profit equal to the difference. they lose money if the stock price goes up. all these people buying GME and driving the price up will hold GME stock, and the shirt sellers will be forced to purchase back the stock at premium prices. even if the stock price goes down slightly, the people buying up all the GME will still profit.

but more importantly a lot of people's goal is to f over a major firm that constantly over leverages itself.

That’s main goal. But what is long term goal of the position. After short sellers go bust. What are people going to do with their positions?

There will always be more short sellers to bet on the overpriced stock to go down ;)

I believe the original r/WSB idea was to induce a short squeeze and cause Melvin Capital to lose their shirts.

See: http://www.isthesqueezesquoze.com/

That’s the main goal. But what’s the plan afterwards? I see posts with people holding a non trivial amount of stock. Losing $100 to own hedgefunds is different than risking $10k+.