Watch Live: GameStop Hearing On Market Manipulation
Jonathan Ponciano, 18 February 2021
A Congressional hearing into the GameStop mania that triggered the largest weekly selloff since late October is underway, with some of the key players in the saga—billionaire Citadel CEO Kenneth Griffin, Robinhood CEO Vladimir Tenev, Reddit Cofounder Steve Huffman and the 34-year-old securities broker behind the Roaring Kitty online persona—all set to testify.
Committee Chair Maxine Waters (D-Mo.) kicked off the hearing by asking Tenev whether he misled investors on January 28 when he denied that Robinhood had a liquidity problem despite raising more than $3 billion in the following days to meet reserve requirements from the Securities & Exchange Commission. Continue reading “Article: Watch Live: GameStop Hearing On Market Manipulation”

One of the most outspoken retail traders on Reddit’s WallStreetBets discussion board has been targeted in a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging the 34-year-old securities broker behind the widely followed “Roaring Kitty” persona committed securities fraud for misrepresenting himself as an amateur trader online while pumping up GameStop stock prices.
Lawsuits related to the Gamestop Corporation GME 0.1% short squeeze have been stacking up following the volatile trading in the stock in January.
Federal authorities are investigating whether massive gains in “meme stocks” like GameStop in January were caused by market manipulation or other illegal behavior, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
Over the last couple of weeks, the financial headlines have been dominated by market manipulation, GameStop, short squeezes, Reddit frenzies and other uncommon topics. A little perspective makes it easier to understand these events and how they should affect your investment strategy.
The Reddit/GameStop aftermath continues. Now, it’s been reported, investigators at the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) are allegedly scouring posts on social media and online message boards for evidence of fraud and coordinated stock-price manipulation in the hype that led to recent unlikely surges in the stock prices of GameStop, AMC Entertainment Holdings, and a few other companies.
So much has been written about GameStop stock it seems pointless to offer yet another take on its saga now. It also seems pointless to guess what motivated the Reddit crowd or why the short sellers hung on for as long as they did. All that is water over the dam, as the saying goes.
As just about everyone knows by now, investors communicating on the Reddit forum WallStreetBets drove up the stock price of GameStop while openly discussing both their tactics and their reasoning. Some of them purchased GameStop shares as part of a strategy expressly intended to squeeze hedge funds that were shorting the stock. Others simply saw the stock as undervalued.