Ever since brokerage houses went to the free trade model the end user no longer was the customer, but became the product. The new customer is the hedge funds/institutions who now pay Robinhood, etrade, and Ameritrade for their order books so they can front run them.
http://theglitteringeye.com/how-do-you-spell-pitchfork/ excerpt: What we’re seeing in this incident, in the breaching of the Capitol, and in the mass demonstrations over the summer is enormous dissatisfaction but it’s not just dissatisfaction. What we’re seeing, too, is the challenge that the Internet, broadly, and social media in particular pose to power structures throughout our entire society. Not just government but journalism, media, financial, and banking. In due course it will invade every area. more at the link
Which wasn't a secret. Facebook... Google Search... Google Maps.... ain't no free lunch in this world.
That's a b.s. article. Trying to compare this to the excesses of the housing crisis is nuts. It's not even the same ball park. Hedge funds are completely separate and run independently of banks. The idea of a hedge fund is to over investors lower risk options to investing through hedging bets - the opposite of the goal of a CMO which is to lower risk by pooling risky bets. Shorting a stock isn't going to drive a company out of business. People on reddit just don't understand why driving the price off a poor performing company doesn't do anything but increase the chances that retail investors will lose money. Brokers like Robinhood are right to limit trading as they are trying to protect dumb investors who jump on the bandwagon from gambling and buying a stock just before it crashes and thus losing a lot of money.
Funny enough, these people on reddit accidentally pumped up the blockbuster liquidation holding company (presumably because they were trying to actually pump blackberry). At one point, Blockbuster was up 700% the other day.
