Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Here are the rules for registered investment advisors.[1]

This was a pump and dump. Those have been around since at least the 19th century. Older ones involved newspapers and newsletters. Newer ones involve social media. The SEC fines people for this regularly. This time, the suckers were people who hadn't seen this a few dozen times yet.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/divisions/investment/iaregulation/memoia...

View on HN

This wasn't a pump and dump though. Even if it never hit WSB the pump (squeeze of the short sellers) would have happened. The defining feature of a pump and dump is a socially engineered pump. Here the social aspect was more like "Look what is going to happen with or without us, we should ride it up. It is also obviously going to crash right after". People from WSB to Scion capital saw this coming, and got in.

I’m not a lawyer but Gill’s conduct was different from Reddit pumping accounts. He has been posting detailed information about his opinion on GME being undervalued for reasons largely different than a “gamma squeeze” or “short squeeze” for a year on YouTube. He just happens to be the most readily sue-able because of this long post history.

I don't think GME will end up being justly classified as a pump and dump scheme - for pump and dumps there needs to be both intent and ability and while there is surely both intent and ability in r/WSB I think an investigation will find that no one with the intent actually had the community presence to sway folks - that said, some rando in the community might end up taking the fall and being a scapegoat.

Has this guy ever been fined?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3ckpMQ4tgE

Reply on news.ycombinator.com