Sure, we've all seen the movies; "hedge funds cheat" is not new information. But this is all very out in the open and very directly targeted at retail investors. There's a lot of noise being made and everyone has taken notice. I would argue the state of everyone's knowledge has advanced.
Although the truth is, retail traders are incredibly disadvantaged due to immense informational asymmetry. Hedge funds probably have access to all the data they want (for example, Citadel having access to Robinhood trade flow), but ordinary people have to first wade through all the misleading information both on mainstream media and on social media, so it's a pretty hard fight. But regardless of the results, I think there would be much more distrust towards financial institutions and mainstream media overall due to this event, and this would be only the beginning of 2021.
Two of my friends got into trading because of this (and not in fuck the system way).
I don't think you could get net negative in this situation.
Or am I missing something?
Are they though? I mean the idea that hedge funds are rigging the system is so well established in the public psyche it drove the meme stocks in the first place.
If people's conclusions from all this are that Melvin Capital lied about unwinding their shorts and Robinhood rigged it for them but those nice people saying BUY AND HOLD YOLO on reddit were fighting their corner, has the state of their knowledge advanced?