6 Comments
Jun 12Liked by Vince Martin

My unpolished view is that this isn't manipulation and that it is entirely victimless. It is so bad (substantively) that it is good (legally). Or, rather, no one could mistake it for sober analysis. It is literally for entertainment purposes only and followers get what they came for. My $0.02 here https://chrisdemuthjr.medium.com/nihilism-sputters-f77bef32c2e2

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good piece.

can see two points there. First, if you invite everyone to a pool party and it's actually in a shark tank, that's not great. if you say, "hey, everyone, let's go swim in the shark tank!!!", that's crazy but not necessarily dishonest (particularly if you, too, are going swimming). No one is really being deceived.

Second, you can argue that GME is taking place within the stock market, but it's not really part of the stock market. It's a separate ecosystem, for lack of a better word, and therefore doesn't affect (or infect) the rest of the environment. The cash going to GameStop corporate to buy GME in the ATM offering isn't cash that would have gone to buy some value stock or an index fund, but instead would have been bet on the Yankees money line or DogeCoin or what have you.

I think the one catch is that there are victims. FINRA employees had to work from home because of death threats related to MMTLP (can you imagine choosing to work at sleepy old FINRA and a year later getting death threats?) I'm actually quite stunned that there hasn't been a confirmed, violent, high-profile incident surrounding meme stocks to this point (whether the violence was directed outward or inward), but that remains a very real possibility.

and the interesting question, I think, is what the effect of all this is in, say, 2031. What happens to the people playing GME, many of whom probably aren't actually investors in size right now, when they're actually supposed to become investors?

We've got literally millions of people saying, "well, this is all rigged." Do they really believe that? Will they *still* believe that? I think enough people have gotten involved across the various meme stocks that if the answers to both of those questions are yes, then you probably have a material impact on overall behavior down the line.

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In trying to answer what was Hwang’s ultimate motive, the answer might lie in the name he chose to give to his family office. “Archegos” means “leader” or “boss” in Greek.

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you see that as supporting the prosecution argument — the point was the power, to have the biggest possible staff working for him?

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Jun 12Liked by Vince Martin

Some version of that possibly. Be recognized as the “investor genius” who generated extraordinary returns? Who knows

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a lot of evidence from the trial that he told his staff to manipulate near-term prices, which, without an obvious exit strategy, supports your point. If he held IQ at $25 or whatever, that held his paper value, meant he still was a massive part of the market, and that alone might have been enough.

not impossible to see how that becomes self-fulfilling behavior - the goal initially is becoming big and then the thrill is staying big.

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