In today's edition of DDDD (Data-Driven DD), we’ll be going over over the details about what happened this week with GME, the drama around Robinhood and other brokers, and take a close look at some data to determine whether or not GME and other various meme / high SI stocks such as AMC, BBBY, FIZZ, LGND, and BB will continue 🚀🚀🚀in its short squeeze this week, and how this all could lead to widespread stock market crash and financial crisis. But first, something to cover my ass for the SEC investigators combing through this Subreddit
Disclaimer - This is not financial advice, and a lot of the content below is my personal opinion and for ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY. In fact, the numbers, facts, or explanations presented below could be wrong and be made up and with some satire thrown in. Don't buy random options because some person on the internet says so. Do your own research and come to your own conclusions on what you should do with your own money, and how levered you want to be based on your personal risk tolerance.
What Exactly Happened at Robinhood This Week?
There has been plenty of speculation this week about what exactly went down and unverified (although reasonable) rumors on why Robinhood did this. I’ll go over the top two theories before taking a deep dive into the “official” reason given by Robinhood.
Pressure from the White House and Sequoia according to a Robinhood employee
This statement has been refuted by Sequoia. I personally wouldn’t believe the Sequoia part since I don’t really know what they would gain from it - they’re a Venture Capital firm, not a hedge fund, and would not be actively shorting stocks let alone be trading in stocks. It could be possible that the White House, or someone from the government did contact Robinhood - actually, I’d be pretty shocked if no one called them at some point this week to ask wtf was going on.During this call, they may have been afraid that GameStop’s short squeeze would have triggered a major financial crisis due to hedge funds collapsing and de-grossing, causing a mass selloff similar to what was seen in 2008 and in March 2020 - I’ll talk more about this later. Basically, without Robinhood shutting down GME from being bought, it’s actually very possible we would have seen the rest of the stock market collapse last week, and this was something the Biden administration was trying to make sure didn’t happen in the first month in office.
Possible intervention from Citadel Securities
This was a theory I personally believed in initially and would have been a very obvious area of scrutiny for many people. The most straightforward one being the fact that Citadel (the hedge fund) dumped a few billion into Melvin to bail it out a few days ago, who were the very well known shorts of GME. Citadel, the hedge fund, is owned by Citadel LLC, which happens to also run Citadel Securities - a market maker. If you don’t know what this is, go grow a few brain wrinkles and read my previous post about this. Citadel Securities is effectively Robinhood’s sugar daddy, directly being responsible for around 40% of their revenue in 2018 through their payment for order flow (i.e. selling your trades to Citadel, giving them the right of first refusal, and potentially giving you a worse price; this is how they get 0% commission trades btw).
Theoretically, Ci