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Frenzied trading in the shares of GameStop and other companies will be the subject of what is expected to be a fiery hearing in Congress on Thursday, when US politicians get their first chance to quiz executives from the trading app Robinhood, Reddit and other players in the saga.
The House financial services committee will hold a hearing at noon in a first step to untangling the furore surrounding trading in GameStop, AMC cinemas and other companies whose share values soared to astronomical levels as small investors piled into the stocks.
Shares in GameStop, a troubled video games chain store, soared 1,600% in January, as an army of small investors, many using the trading app Robinhood, appeared to have bet that Wall Street hedge funds had overplayed their hand when betting the stock price would collapse – a practice known as short-selling. Spurred on by meme-toting members of the Reddit forum WallStreetBets, investors kept buying the shares, driving up the price and triggering huge losses for some hedge funds.
Robinhood briefly suspended trading in GameStop and other hot stocks at the end of January and sparked allegations that the hedge funds and others may have pushed Robinhood and other trading platforms to stop the rout.
Among those testifying are: Robinhood’s CEO, Vlad Tenev, Reddit’s CEO, Steve Huffman, Gabe Plotkin, founder of the Melvin Capital Management hedge fund (which was forced into a rescue after retail traders crushed its bets against GameStop), Ken Griffin, billionaire CEO of Citadel, an investment firm that executes Robinhood clients’ trades and also helped to bail out Melvin, and Keith Gill, a trader variously known online as "Roaring Kitty" and "DeepFuckingValue" and a longtime GameStop booster.
The associate director for economic policy at the Center for American Progress, said: “The GameStop drama raised quite a few public policy questions but first it’s important for members of Congress to understand how events played out.”
More broadly, he said, GameStop had highlighted many crucial issues for regulators, including the role and regulation of hedge funds, whether or how Wall Street is using social media to drive investment strategy, the “gamification” of investing by trading apps and the economic incentives at play for the trading platforms.
“What would have happened if Robinhood had failed? What would have been the knock-on effects for financial markets?” he asked. “These are huge investor protection questions.
The hearing will not be the last inquiry that the executives at the center of the controversy will face. Federal prosecutors have begun an investigation, according to the Wall Street Journal, and the Securities and Exchange Commission, the US’s top financial watchdog, is reportedly combing through social media posts for signs of potential fraud.
In the meantime, evidence has emerged that small investors were not the largest buyers of GameStop and other hot companies. According to an analysis by JP Morgan, institutional investors may have been behind much of the dramatic rise in the share price: “Although retail buying was portrayed as the main driver of the extreme price rally experienced by some stocks, the actual picture may be much more nuanced”.
© 2015 Mutual Fund Observer. All rights reserved.
© 2015 Mutual Fund Observer. All rights reserved. Powered by Vanilla
Comments
Nice to know there will be a thorough, unbiased and consequential examination of this carried out by appropriately trained and experienced individuals of the highest intellect and integrity motivated by the most noble of ambitions.
The other thing is the portrayal that short-sellers are the real villains here. Short sellers have probably exposed more corporate fraud and general corporate s--ttery than just about any other gorup. They're not heroic in most cases, although occasionally they are, getting death threats for merely criticizing a popular company, but they certainly aren't the villains they're depicted as.