1. Man yesterday was surreal for me.

   I’d known about the reddit GME thing since like Monday or so, and I’d been following it with some amusement. Under normal circumstances I would have looked at the situation and said “oh, those poor redditors! They’re being taken in by a pump and dump scam!”

   But no. They know that the GME prices are grossly overinflated. It’s the entire point. They know that after today the price will crash back down. The point is not profit, the point is vengeance.

   “Well, that’s interesting” I said to myself.

   I even kind of laughed when other hedge funds had to bail out the targeted hedge fund, essentially expanding the reddit raid to two other funds that weren’t originally part of it.

   Then yesterday. Oh my stars yesterday. The entire wall street apparatus aligned to save the hedge funds and steal the profits from the redditors. Robinhood not only stopped users from being able to buy certain stocks, but they also started selling those stocks held by their users, without their users’ consent. And I am fairly certain that in some cases, they merely refunded the original purchase price instead of selling them at the 400% market rate.

   For user safety, don’t you know.

   Other trading houses did the same, but the hedge funds were allowed to keep trading, pushing the price down over 50%.

   And discord banned them for “hate speech and misinformation.”

   And Vice said “it’s all white supremacists trying to take down the jews”

   And reddit was flooded with bots saying “you’ve just destroyed my dad’s pension!”

   Yesterday was the day I was radicalized against wall street. I woke up amused by some “reddit autists” (as they describe themselves) and by the time I went to bed I was ready to burn down the financial system.

   They changed the rules midstream when “the people” figured out how to game the system in the exact same ways that hedge fund managers have been doing for 40 years.

   This is the state of the US in 2021. I am now more sympathetic to Occupy Wall Street than I am to the GOP.

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2. The question is whether the people who run Robinhood (an aptly named company, it seems) will go to jail. It’s very clear they need to.
   Apart from that, the company should go out of business. I wonder if it will; sensible people now know they can’t be trusted.

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   1. If reddit runs up the price today (for the short squeeze) and then everyone sells tomorrow, robinhood doesn’t have the cash on hand to pay out. They’ll go bankrupt.

      That also means that everyone who has a portfolio with robinhood–even people who didn’t participate in the raid–will become creditors in the bankruptcy. Wall Street will get paid first and retail investors will get paid last, if there’s anything left over after paying the banks.

      Tl;Dr: get out of robinhood today.

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      1. Get out? I wasn’t there in the first place.

         For one, I’m an old fart and am fine with my fuddy-duddy broker (Schwab, fwiw). I learned, since 1999, that there are some advantages to dealing with brokerages that aren’t completely bottom-basement.

         For two, I have no need to trade stocks from my cell phone.

         For three, if I ever develop the desire to trade stocks from my cell phone, Schwab’s app would let me do that.

         Hm … is Robinhood publicly traded? I wonder if I can short them from my cell phone…

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