I knew it…
'GameStop Isn’t a Popular Uprising'
An exclusive look at the data indicates that big players are driving the price, not the little guy trading “stonks.”
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/02/03/gamestop-isnt-a-popular-uprising/
The investors’ struggle over the video game retailer GameStop has been cast as a David versus Goliath story. Allegedly, this is the tale of scrappy, small online day traders buying shares of a beleaguered company to thwart a hedge fund scheme to take it down. Like GameStop’s stock, this narrative is mostly speculation because the facts about the buyers and sellers and their trades are hidden in the records of Robinhood, the new online trading platform, as well as Charles Schwab and other traditional broker-dealers. Only the SEC could demand to inspect those records.
Yet, certain facts are publicly available, including GameStop’s daily trading volume, its daily prices, the number of short sales of its stock, and how many shares are held by big institutional players. Those facts suggest that the Reddit online traders have been on the sidelines of a trading war among a handful of big institutional investors. The SEC should subpoena the records because the hard data also suggest that some big players may be using trading strategies used in the past to manipulate stock prices.
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Based on the data, that is what happened when GameStop’s share price and trading volume took off. Big players were driving the price up (and sometimes down), not the rascally Reddit crowd. On January 13, the stock’s trading volume ballooned to 145 million shares, and its price jumped from $19.95 to $31.00. In one day, the total shares held by all investors (46.9 million) turned over more than three times – and that was only an overture. By Friday, January 22, GameStop’s share price reached $56.04 on volume of 197 million shares, and the following Monday, it jumped to $76.79 per-share on trading of 178 million shares. Over the rest of last week (January 26-January 29), GameStop’s share prices gyrated from $148 to $347 to $194 to $325 on average trading volume of 126 million shares per day.
Unless most of the Reddit bunch have assets in the top one-tenth of one percent of Americans, they were mere bystanders to last week’s trading of 682 million shares at an average price of $218.20 – purchases totaling nearly $150 billion in a wildly volatile market. Only institutional investors have such resources to trade stocks, not self-styled populists with Robinhood on their iPhones. Since most big players are regulated public corporations with fiduciary responsibilities to avoid the enormous risks involved in this high-stakes game of chicken, the GameStop players almost certainly are all lightly regulated hedge funds.
The trading volume and price gyrations also suggest that those hedge funds may be manipulating the market. The financial media has made much about Melvin Capital, a short-selling hedge fund that thought GameStop was overpriced at $31 per share (its January 13 price) or perhaps even at $16.48 (its average price in December). Believing the price would fall, Melvin Capital directed its broker-dealer to borrow millions of shares held by other institutional investors and sell them on its behalf to someone else. Those short sales were Melvin Capital’s bet that GameStop’s price would fall, so it could buy cheaper shares to replace the shares it had borrowed—and pocket a fortune.
But the data tells us that Melvin Capital was not the biggest short-seller and that much of the short-selling of GameStop shares was manipulation. A stock’s short sales are publicly reported twice monthly.
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Consider again a manipulator who bought 500,000 blocks of GameStop shares when the market closed last January 26 (at $148 per share) and sold them as the market closed on January 27 (at $347 per share). He or she walked away with nearly $100 million in profits. If another manipulator pulled the same trick from the market close on January 28 (at $194 per share) to the market close on the 29th (at $325 per share), he or she pocketed $65.5 million in profits. And all of the trading in this period appears to involve a relative handful of large buyers and sellers carrying out trades so large that they drive the price up or down.
In effect, hedge funds may have manipulated GameStop in opposite directions, wringing out profits daily or even two or three times a day. If this is correct, the GameStop saga is not some populist uprising but a rolling version of “pump and dump,” a classic form of manipulation and naked shorting. At a minimum, the facts already known call for an SEC investigation with subpoena power focused on the broker-dealers’ handling of these transactions.