Robinhood Proves the System Is Rigged Against You
Robinhood and other companies are actively protecting Wall Street’s profits by screwing over ordinary investors.
After members of the subreddit r/wallstreetbets took advantage of a market flaw in GameStop, Robinhood and others have attempted to protect Wall Street hedge funds. From preventing users from exploiting the flaw further by blocking trades to forcing users to sell shares they owned, they are attempting to push the price of GameStop shares downward.
Some r/wallstreetbets members had discovered that investors held 144% of GameStop stock in a short position. Simply put, a short position is betting on the stock price going down. If the price goes down, shorts make money, while shorts lose money if it goes up. If there are many shares of a stock held in a short position and a sudden price increase occurs, it could trigger a short squeeze that would skyrocket the price as shorts cover their losses.
After learning about the insane amount of shorts in GameStop, users started campaigning online for others to buy, causing the stock price to go from $40 a share to nearly $500 a share in a few days, costing in Wall Street hedge funds $70 billion. This price shock caused a massive panic on Wall Street as big-name investors were caught entirely off-guard.
Soon after, Wall Street struck back. The stockbroker Robinhood, owned by a hedge fund, started blocking users from buying GameStop shares while still allowing users to sell. Some users have even claimed that Robinhood sold shares they owned without permission. Other brokers also put restrictions on trading the company. Brokers claimed this was due to market volatility, but in reality, these decisions had a clear goal: to bring the stock price back down so Wall Street hedge funds could recover at least some of their losses.
Outraged, Robinhood users flooded the app with negative reviews. One of the few ways consumers can retaliate against a company is to leave a negative review to convince others not to use that product or service. Yet after Redditors beat down Robinhood’s rating to 1-star on the google store, Google deleted over 10,000 negative reviews that brought Robinhood back to a 4-star rating, according to The Verge. Discord also just so happened to ban the r/wallstreetbets Discord channel for hate speech on the same day the stock price skyrocketed, attempting to cut off communications of users who were pumping the stock.
We have all been lied to about how the system works. We are lead to believe that the people who work for Wall Street are the best of the best at making money, and you could be one of them if you just worked hard enough. This idea is not the case, and Wall Street is allowed to operate on a different set of rules and have the full backing of the government and mainstream media. They’re allowed to manipulate stock prices to the detriment of society, but when everyday people rise up together to take on Wall Street by doing the same thing, anti-regulation networks like Fox are suddenly calling for regulations. To quote the great comedian George Carlin, “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.”
