The SEC Is Baffled By GameStop Too
Also anti-green bonds, AMC and Harambe on Wall Street.
Yesterday the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission released a “Staff Report on Equity and Options Market Structure Conditions in Early 2021,” specifically the conditions that allowed GameStop Corp.’s stock to go from $17.25 to $325 over the course of January for no particular reason. It would have been cool if the SEC had, uh, found a reason. If the report was like “actually we looked deep into the stock exchange’s computers and found that they accidentally shifted a decimal point one spot to the right, that was supposed to be $32.50, oops,” that would have been an interesting result.
Or at the time this was all happening, there were a lot of theories about “short squeezes” and “gamma squeezes” and nefarious hedge funds doing evil things to manipulate the stock. If the SEC had said “it was gamma, just so much gamma,” that would have added to our understanding of the world. Or if it had said “actually some big hedge funds were hugely long GameStop and manipulated the price up behind the scenes by doing wash trades with their cronies while pretending to be retail traders on Reddit,” that would have been really cool and fun.