What does make sense to me is that cutting off a substantial amount of retail flow would reduce buying pressure, causing all market participants to regain at least a little confidence in a reversion to the mean. It just seems pretty tinfoil-hatty to me to view this as some sort of elite cabal, as if RH and Citadel were somehow the only participants who could effect price changes.
Reopening auctions concentrate trading volumes. This may look more suspicious because volume is so concentrated, but in reality they give about five minutes for many participants to join and it all executes at one price. Prices I see for reopenings are approximately
330 290 265 226 170 140 120 141 170 210 216
The idea that the 120,140 were lower than "market prices" is solidly in tail-wagging-dog category. GME sold off hard, yes, but it was over the course of almost an hour and with substantial trading across the entire price range. This is natural when any imbalanced order flow has previously pushed prices and then subsides.
Note that 120 was the low and prices retraced through about half of the prior range. That retracement started at around 11:20 ET. Do you know when RH or other brokers had opening buy orders blocked and subsequently unblocked? Given that RH needed to secure cash for DTCC'S requirements, I expect that retracement was during the blocked period still.
Overall this still looks like tinfoil hat theory from WSB. Volatility looks crazy and it's easy to see demons in the shadows.
https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l9auf5/impo...
https://seekingalpha-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/seekingalpha...
The description of a short ladder attack from 2014 strongly implies that the short party is attemping to manipulate a stock from its prevailing fundamental value. There is a key difference in that GME's fundamental value is nowhere near the $300+ range that it was trading it on Thursday!
There need not be a misinformation campaign or "attack" for well-capitalized fundamental traders to see opportunity to sell into this. Especially after seeing the capital crunch nailing retail brokers.
I wondered if it was autocorrect but it's all over reddit too.
As best as I can see, they're saying the price falls if hedge funds decide to lower the bid price. That doesn't make much sense to me, but I'm not (quite) all knowing so...
Every time artificial limits were imposed by RH, the price dropped in __all__ the restricted stocks. That is when they restricted shares to 0, or to 2, and subsequently to 1, and again to 0.
On Friday, there were puts expiring and HFs stood to lose a lot, they didn't, and the answer is obvious as to why.