What's the proof that any retail investor actually bought GME?
How many retail investors actually bought GME?
How much money did they win or loose?
See e.g. https://fortune.com/2021/02/02/robinhood-gamestop-restricted...
"Clearinghouses are SEC-registered organizations that act as the central depository for securities. They keep a record of the stocks owned through a brokerage. Clearing brokerages, like Robinhood Securities, are members of clearinghouses."
"The amount required by clearinghouses to cover the settlement period of some securities rose tremendously this week. How much? To put it in perspective, this week alone, our clearinghouse-mandated deposit requirements related to equities increased ten-fold."
https://blog.robinhood.com/news/2021/1/29/what-happened-this...
i have no idea why people think robinhood is a clearinghouse, that doesn’t make sense. they don’t want to do that! they want to do PFOF with execution or make settlement take 0 days so they can further take advantage of retail or whatever. being a clearinghouse sucks. no one likes you. banks don’t want to do your job.
Using inspect element sounds like too much trouble when you can just use fake money instead.
I'm not saying I feel strongly either way, but I think peopel on the internet lying is a pretty simple explanation.
On their free time they do tutorials about their process, their tools, etc.
Saying that they are a retail trader is like saying that Warren Buffet is a retail trader when they trade with their own private money and not the money of their clients.
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Also, you can just open a paper trading account and trade with fake money. Then the screenshots look real.
I do this all the time when I need to explain an options play to somebody. Just switch to paper trading, give yourself a million $, and enter the trade.
If I had to show somebody in a podcast how to trade, I would open a paper trading account just to put an amount of money that would be reasonable for that person, so that they can better get a feeling of what the wins and the losses look like.
I find the memes there funny, and I like interacting with the people and just talking dumb stuff.
I think most of the screenshots that get posted are fake, and that most people that frequent it also mostly do because they find it fun.
Not necessarily inspect element, but also screenshots from paper-trading accounts, etc.
If you follow the stock market, it is a relatively random place, and train collisions do often happen, so it is nice to have a place to talk about those with people that find them funny, and that also find "let's put out this fire with gasoline" funny.
Citadel says you were right to ask these questions:
https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/i9SnRzR8AM1...
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-29/reddit...
The main takeaway is that the flow was, essentially, net 0. So retail (or the bit of retail flow that Citadel saw, anyway) wasn't buying GME more than selling, in aggregate.
Also aforementioned impact on robinhood and other retail brokers.
Is that proof enough? that's up to you, but I doubt most people have seen "proof" that hedgefunds have been buying up shorts either, we just trust that we aren't being lied to by whoever is doing the reporting (and I personally find that to be plenty sufficient).