The stock market is a massive, global industry in which huge quantities of money are shifted around internationally; the largest individual stock exchange in New York is listed at a market capitalization (the total value of all shares and securities traded by said exchange) of $26.23 trillion USD.[1] Due to this vast amount of wealth, companies band together to take advantage of this, and due to most individuals being either unable or uninterested in getting heavily involved with the stock market, they are free to manipulate it as they please due to essentially holding a monopoly on the market. These groups often have overwhelming amounts of wealth to throw behind their investments, and professional traders who are constantly watching the market. This makes it very hard for small companies or individual investors to compete against them in any meaningful way. These large organizations which have recently been publicly exposed for using manipulative marketing practices often fall under the category of “hedge funds.”
“A hedge fund is a pooled investment fund that trades in relatively liquid assets and is able to make extensive use of more complex trading, portfolio-construction and risk management techniques in an attempt to improve performance, such as short selling, leverage, and derivatives.”[2]
Trading tactics
One of these manipulative practices is known as “shorting”. This involves borrowing stocks of a company, then selling these borrowed stocks to the market for a cash return, then when hopefully the price falls, you can re-purchase the stocks at a lower price and return them to the lender whilst keeping the difference in price as a profit for yourself.
Naturally, there is risk associated with this and for small investors this can be potentially extremely hazardous, as if the price rises instead of falling there is no upper limit for how much it can increase, which can lead to you losing substantial amounts of capital buying back vastly more expensive shares to return to the broker. Similarly, the opposite “long” stance can be taken assuming the share price will rise. However, if you are a large company working with others you can easily already hold stocks and sell to almost ensure a significant decrease in price to bring in huge and reliable profits.
The paramount issue here is that, despite this being highly manipulative and an abuse of their power in a marketplace which is supposed to be a level-playing field for all, this activity is not illegal in its own right, and can be summarised as a failing on the behalf of regulators and authorities who are supposed to ensure the market operates fairly for all involved.
In contrast, despite regulators failing to act to remedy the situation, a forum from the popular online platform “Reddit” called R/WallstreetBets noticed that these hedge funds were massively manipulating stocks in this way to make profits, and thus banded together to collectively invest in the stock of a company called GameStop. This collective action has had a huge impact of the entirety of the stock market as action like this which took an estimated US $70 billion from the large wall street companies.[5] This unprecedented action and following wide-scale exposure of the tactics used to the general public will likely drastically shape the future of the market and effect the extent to which people can abuse these mechanics.
[1] 'New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) | Tradinghours.Com' (Tradinghours.com, 2021) <https://www.tradinghours.com/markets/nyse#market-cap%20/%20https://www.world-exchanges.org/> accessed 13 March 2021.
[2] 'Hedge Fund' (En.wikipedia.org, 2021) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedge_fund> accessed 13 March 2021.
[3] The Balance, 'The Basics Of Shorting Stock' <https://www.thebalance.com/the-basics-of-shorting-stock-356327> accessed 13 March 2021.
[4] Mad Money, 'Jim Cramer, 2006 Discussion About Tricks To Manipulate The Market' <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIfixbq_u0Q> accessed 5 March 2021.
[5] Sujata Rao and Thyagaraju Adinarayan, 'Wall Street Titans Lose More Than US$70B Amid Reddit Frenzy That Fuelled Gamestop And Others' (Global News, 2021) <https://globalnews.ca/news/7604866/short-position-losses/> accessed 13 March 2021.
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