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The Almighty Buck

Robinhood Stops Limiting GameStop Shares (reuters.com) 22

Robinhood has lifted all the buying curbs imposed at the height of the battle between amateur investors and Wall Street hedge funds. The change comes one week after the online broker limited clients to only buying a single share of GameStop and expanded its list of restricted stocks from 13 to 50. Reuters reports: The videogame retailer, the initial trigger for the market slugfest, was up 8.4% in U.S. pre-market trading although the wild gyrations seen in the past two weeks appeared to have fizzled out. Robinhood, among the fee-free online brokers that are credited with fueling the trades, said late on Thursday it had removed all buying restrictions imposed due to a surge in clearing house deposit requirements last week.

With many of the stocks involved in the so-called "Reddit rally" slumping this week, hedge funds with bearish positions on GameStop made $3.6 billion in profits compared to losses of $12.5 billion in January, financial analytics firm Ortex said on Friday. GameStop's stock has crashed to about $53 after scaling as high as $483 last week, but is still up about 177% from the levels at the start of the rally. Shares of cinema operator AMC Entertainment have more than halved from a peak of $19.90. They were up 5.2% on Friday. Meanwhile, on WallStreetBets on Reddit, participants were still urging investors to stick with GameStop.

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Robinhood Stops Limiting GameStop Shares

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  • by AleRunner ( 4556245 ) on Friday February 05, 2021 @06:23PM (#61032700)

    Okay, I have no real evidence, but why worry about truth when I can speculate wildly and occasionally be right.

    • There was i think a class action lawsuit against them for this, no matter what if they win or lose they are still screwed cause the trust is gone. If they are willing prevent a stock from trading to save a client hedge fund selling stock that didn't exist then well they will do it again.
      • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        How about that public ruling by the SEC in deeds not words. Corporations and Hedge Funds are ALLOWED to manipulate stock prices, individuals are banned from resisting those stock manipulations. Talk about in you face corporate ownership of US regulatory authorities, truly gob smacking the shameless corruption on public display, they don't even pretend to be honest, just claim the crime is honest and honesty is a crime right in your face, even when they know you know it is a lie, no problem corporate main st

    • that have been buying the stock. Reddit & WSB appears to just be a cover for their activities.

      The House Always Wins.
      • that have been buying the stock. Reddit & WSB appears to just be a cover for their activities. The House Always Wins.

        I tried convincing my friend (who works at the SEC, but not in that dept.) that this was the case. He kept sending me articles about Robinhood traders causing this, and I had to inform him that was obviously a cover story.

        No way do regular folk, even in very large numbers, have the kind of money it would take to pull that sort of thing off.

        • by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 05, 2021 @07:49PM (#61032996)

          No way do regular folk, even in very large numbers, have the kind of money it would take to pull that sort of thing off.

          I grabbed this data on 2/5/2021, only for discussion's sake:

          Shares Outstanding 69.75M
          Float: 46.89M
          % Held by Insiders: 27.33%
          % Held by Institutions: 122.04%

          Let's say out of 6 million WallStreetBets users, thy average one share each. Most hold zero shares, some have hundreds. Because like you said, regular folks don't have that kind of money. Does a new demand for 10% of the outstanding shares affect the share price? You bet it does.

          And curiously look at that, institutions and insiders hold more than 100% total shares. That means there are negative shares in public. Any demand for publicly traded shares will have a huge impact on price. An army of casual traders would have a disproportionate influence compared to their numbers and available capital.

          But honestly, I'm going to wait for someone to write a serious book about this. I think it's a topic worth exploring deeper than my simple napkin math and both of our assumptions. I'd like to see a pretty thorough review of what happened. Especially before I start insisting there is some "cover story"

        • /rwallstreetbets currently has 8.6 million members. Gamestop has about 46 million shares outstanding not held by company insiders. why is it wildly implausible that on average they could have enough money to buy 5 shares each?
          • by Ambvai ( 1106941 )

            With the number of people upset that they turned off fractional shares on GME, I find it possible but unlikely that the average number of shares owned by an individual on WSB was greater than 5, even if you ignore the duplicate/bot accounts.

    • by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

      > Okay, I have no real evidence, but why worry about truth when I can speculate wildly and occasionally be right.

      Are you talking about oil exploration? Research and development? Or something as simple as opening a new restaurant in a sea of existing stores? What kind of wild speculation are you referring to?

    • Most importantly when you're just speaking out loud what's on everyone's mind.

  • I was going to sell my house and put literally everything I owned into GameStop, but it's *already* crashed.

  • hedge funds unwind their shorts enough to be safe?
  • Just a clearing house problem. But trust us we have you as #1 in our hearts and minds.

Business is a good game -- lots of competition and minimum of rules. You keep score with money. -- Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari

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