I can't. They all saw this coming from at least two days before, and they managed to fix this problem with a trading session. Rather than freeze the entire market on GME so no one could buy or sell, institutional traders were free to buy out of their positions while retail accounts were being liquidated in a coordinated fashion across all brokerages.
It's very clear to me that insiders saw the how much hurt this short squeeze would bring the financial markets, and they all coordinated to relieve it. It's no coincidence so many hedge funds started degrossing, futures were down, and the VIX spiked to the moon exactly as $GME's price started accelerating...
...once brokerages bricked buying the VIX collapsed and markets rose.
Infinity squeeze averted and all's well in Wall Street. No big institution is likely at risk anymore and retail traders along with smaller funds will be the bagholders.
Who is “they”? Unless I’m very much mistaken, Robinhood has no institutional clients. The institutional clients as well as the more serious retail clients were unaffected.
It would be quite odd to halt trading on a stock market-wide because a small number of brokers run out of collateral.
Stop being "less smart". Robinhood's clients are/is a hedge fund manager, Citadel Securities - Robinhood’s largest customer, which tried to bail out Melvin Capital which got bankrupted in the short squeeze on GME. Unless you've lived under a rock you should know by now how Robinhood is making the money.
IB's CEO was interviewed on CNBC, and he actually said that his motivation was to "protect the market" ... specifically large players important to the market, whose solvency was threatened by the short squeeze.
"... we are concerned about the financial viability of intermediaries and the clearing house."
> There is no doubt that a default by a clearinghouse member is more likely when initial margins are low and may be
caused by a sharp unexpected move in the underlying markets. In the event of a default by one member this could trigger
a chain reaction. Firstly, initial margins will rise in an event of a default, which will restrict other trader’s ability to
participate in the market possibly acerbating the move in the underlying markets. Secondly, if the defaulting member was
a particularly large player in one asset (likely, as this would be the cause of the default), the members with opposite
positions may not receive variation margin and hence will become unhedged at the very moment they need hedging.
Thirdly, the clearinghouse may well have to recapitalise itself from the surviving members. Major clearinghouse members (including JP Morgan) appear to be seriously worried about a clearinghouse problem after the default by a member of Nasdaq Clearing AB ..."
When you put some billionaire guys, some of them happen to be have multiple roles such market makers, brokers, hedge funds that short GME and even the investors in the brokerage platform where GME is traded on one side and some poor retailers on the side side you don't need a big brain to figure out who wins.
Maybe you are not aware but Melvin lost almost 3 billions and was bailed out by Citadel and Point72 and probably they will loose even more and go bankrupt if they don't stop people buying GME.
Do you think these guys want to leave all that cash on the table and play fair? If you look at Point72 owner(Cohen) you see some really "interesting" things.
I could buy GME through ETrade but IB wouldn't allow a buy with cash. The chairman said something about market health but the reason he gave was about margin without using that word.
> It's very clear to me that insiders saw the how much hurt this short squeeze would bring the financial markets
Maybe. But if this is a trolly car problem it's clear they made the call to let the train run down the track with the retail investor when it should have been the track that eviscerated Citron and Melvin and all their backers.
Big institutions that made the bad trades should have been the bagholders.
It's very clear to me that insiders saw the how much hurt this short squeeze would bring the financial markets, and they all coordinated to relieve it. It's no coincidence so many hedge funds started degrossing, futures were down, and the VIX spiked to the moon exactly as $GME's price started accelerating...
...once brokerages bricked buying the VIX collapsed and markets rose.
Infinity squeeze averted and all's well in Wall Street. No big institution is likely at risk anymore and retail traders along with smaller funds will be the bagholders.