Robert J. Shapiro | 21.02.03
The investors’ struggle over the video game retailer GameStop has been cast as a David versus Goliath story. Allegedly, this is the tale of scrappy, small online day traders buying shares of a beleaguered company to thwart a hedge fund scheme to take it down. Like GameStop’s stock, this narrative is mostly speculation because the facts about the buyers and sellers and their trades are hidden in the records of Robinhood, the new online trading platform, as well as Charles Schwab and other traditional broker-dealers. Only the SEC could demand to inspect those records.
Yet, certain facts are publicly available, including GameStop’s daily trading volume, its daily prices, the number of short sales of its stock, and how many shares are held by big institutional players. Those facts suggest that the Reddit online traders have been on the sidelines of a trading war among a handful of big institutional investors. The SEC should subpoena the records because the hard data also suggest that some big players may be using trading strategies used in the past to manipulate stock prices.
Let’s start with the trading data.
