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Comment by dougmwne | Hacker News Reader

I have been seeing people on WSB claim that the stock price shown on the ticker is "manipulated by the hedgies" and asking when the real stock price is going to finally appear. This is pretty similar to Q people asking when it will be revealed that 45 is still the president. That one absolutely fits my definition of "wild conspiracy theory."

In terms of more popular accusations of wrongdoing among brokerages as they shut down the buy side, that seems plausible but hard to prove coordination unless someone recorded the conversation in a smoke filled room. If there was big money to make and a way to get away with it, I assume most corporations would engage in illegal activities.

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I’m certainly not denying there’s plenty of misinformation and far fetched theories floating around. I think there’s a big middle ground between “accept every half brained idea on Reddit” and “take a 300 word corporate blog post at face value.”

It is a fact that the relevant ticker symbols were hidden in Robinhood UI during the restrictions. This could simply be because the UI always hid symbols with restrictions, but that would be a strange decision in the first place (why not just always show the tickers info?) and in context is another oddity worth looking into.

My suggested middle ground is, call for investigation. Maybe there’s no smoking gun but if, for example, it was uncovered that a huge amount of institutional short covering took place during the restrictions that would be more hints that foul play occurred and justify more investigation.

In the future, if we don’t get answers , well connected players can manipulate markets by blaming opaque clearing house requirements unless more transparency is added.

My concern is that by being too dismissive of calls for investigation, we lose the political steam to at least try and get better answers that we deserve.

> I have been seeing people on WSB claim that the stock price shown on the ticker is "manipulated by the hedgies" and asking when the real stock price is going to finally appear. This is pretty similar to Q people asking when it will be revealed that 45 is still the president.

I don't think it's fair to draw an equivalence between the two theories.

It's pretty easy for a large market participant to impact the bid/offer when there isn't much liquidity, especially if the natural buyers are restricted from trading. The price moves because of supply and demand.

The WSB perspective is perhaps a bit uninformed, but it's not particularly bizarre (unlike the QAnon garbage). They're just asking "when will the price reflect our pent-up demand rather than artificial supply?"

Unfortunately, the reality is that prices get set during these moments of absolute craziness. That's why you sometimes see hedge funds reload after hours after an earnings miss on one of their long positions. They want to absorb the supply so the stock doesn't crash lower.

Look at GME today. The price moved a couple of percent even though nobody has the slightest reason to believe that GME stock is worth this particular price. Some say it should be higher due to flows around positioning, and others say it should be lower because of fundamentals.

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