The background:
Amateur investors, perhaps propelled by a mix of greed and boredom, are looking to teach Wall Street a lesson. They’ve come together on a popular Reddit page, Wall Street Bets, to push the stock of companies like GameStop — up 1,700% — to outrageous highs.
The results:
Hedge-Fund Titans Lose Billions to Reddit Traders Running Amok
The crying:
My take:
Dear SEC:
Hi! Just a reminder that your job is to police the stock market so that people can have confidence in it and so that average investors don’t lose their shirts by following the rules and playing nice.
You may be tempted to just go after the “Reddit Traders” and leave the hedge funds alone. That would completely undermine the point of your existence. Either no one should play games with stock prices, or everyone gets to play games with stock prices.
I mention this because after the financial collapse in 2008, y’all spent a bunch of time investigating the few folks who showed you up to the public (you know, the heroes of The Big Short) rather than the investors who created the problems in the first place. For a lot of people, this confirmed that you were rigging the game for the few rather than protecting the public.
So don’t do that again.
Kthxbai.
Amateur investors, perhaps propelled by a mix of greed and boredom, are looking to teach Wall Street a lesson. They’ve come together on a popular Reddit page, Wall Street Bets, to push the stock of companies like GameStop — up 1,700% — to outrageous highs.
The results:
Hedge-Fund Titans Lose Billions to Reddit Traders Running Amok
The crying:
My take:
Dear SEC:
Hi! Just a reminder that your job is to police the stock market so that people can have confidence in it and so that average investors don’t lose their shirts by following the rules and playing nice.
You may be tempted to just go after the “Reddit Traders” and leave the hedge funds alone. That would completely undermine the point of your existence. Either no one should play games with stock prices, or everyone gets to play games with stock prices.
I mention this because after the financial collapse in 2008, y’all spent a bunch of time investigating the few folks who showed you up to the public (you know, the heroes of The Big Short) rather than the investors who created the problems in the first place. For a lot of people, this confirmed that you were rigging the game for the few rather than protecting the public.
So don’t do that again.
Kthxbai.
“We can never undo what we have done. We can never go back in time. We write history with our decisions and our actions. But we also write history with our responses to those actions. We can leave the pain and the damage in our wake, unattended, or we can do the work of acknowledging and fixing, to whatever extent possible, the harm that we have caused.”
— On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World by Danya Ruttenberg
— On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World by Danya Ruttenberg