Comment by seanalltogether | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seanalltogether | Hacker News Reader

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seanalltogether

matt levine talks about this very thing in one of his other posts on wsj

> So if you buy stock with the purpose of pushing the price up so that other people will buy it, that’s market manipulation. If you buy stock hoping that the price will go up because other people buy it, that’s not market manipulation; that’s just normal. Those things are not so different. There is a “traditional four-part test for manipulation that has developed in case law”:

    (1) That the accused had the ability to influence market prices; (2) that the accused specifically intended to create or effect a price or price trend that does not reflect legitimate forces of supply and demand; (3) that artificial prices existed; and (4) that the accused caused the artificial prices.

What is an artificial price and how does it differ from a real price?

It's a price that "does not reflect legitimate forces of supply and demand". One of the canonical examples of an artificial price is spoofing, where you set up fake sell orders to trick people into thinking a stock is crashing so you can buy it at a discount.

So when people who want to buy and have the funds to buy are prevented from buying by their broker, would the resulting price be one that "does not reflect legitimate forces of supply and demand"?

In general, no, brokers being unwilling or unable to help facilitate a trade is a legitimate market factor. There's no fundamental right to have people trade with you.

It's would of course be a different story if the broker's unwillingness came from their participation in a price manipulation scheme. I don't think that's really plausible here, although I suppose I wouldn't rule it out given the crazy dumb things Robinhood has done in the past.

The "legitimate forces of supply and demand" seems to be the critical part there. GME stock didn't go up because /u/DeepFuckingValue bought so much of it, it went up because everyone else did. In August 2019 GME had a market cap of $300 million so there was no way /u/DeepFuckingValue buying some hundreds of thousands worth had any real effect on its own.

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