Rashida Tlaib blasts Robinhood app for protecting rich hedge fund investors in GameStop stock drama
By know you've probably heard of the drama surrounding the stock market, in which an army of amateur investors from Reddit's WallStreetBets board banded together to massively inflate stocks as a way to stick it to rich hedge fund short-sellers who were betting on them to fail.
We're no financial experts — hence why we wound up in the field of journalism — but The New York Times has perhaps the best explainer so far to help catch you up to speed (at least until filmmaker Adam McKay gets Margot Robbie to explain it while taking a bubble bath). Basically, as the stock goes up, short-sellers are forced to buy more shares, which can make the price go up even more, putting the squeeze on the short-sellers.
Ironically, the drama centers around GameStop, the strip mall video game reseller — highlighting just how much the stock market is actually itself just a giant video game. But the irony doesn't end there.
On Thursday, in response to the stock market volatility, the stock-trading app Robinhood said it was "restricting transactions for certain securities to position closing only" — in other words, people could only use the app to sell shares, but not to buy them, effectively shutting the amateur investors out.
Read more: https://www.metrotimes.com/news-hits/archives/2021/01/28/rashida-tlaib-blasts-robinhood-app-for-protecting-rich-hedge-fund-investors-in-gamestop-stock-market-drama