Liberal logic: Gamestop edition

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When 100 people spend $1m each to frick a stock's price for pure profit, it's free market capitalism.

When a million people invest $100 each to save a company they love, it's market manipulation.

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Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business, said a number of factors fueled the “nitro meets glycerin” reaction that led to GameStop stock’s explosive rise.

“What we have is the perfect storm of stimulus money, a cohort of younger investors — or some people would call them gamblers — entering the market,” Galloway told ABC News. “And we also have these platforms that encourage sort of these weapons of mass trading in the form of margin [calls] or options that creates this explosive upward effect.”

“Also, you have the social media fixation of stock-picking where individuals, including Elon Musk, can put out a one-word tweet and send a stock rocketing up 50% in after hours,” he added. “It really is the perfect storm of volatility for equities.”

Cameron Bublick, 20, a student at New Jersey’s Rutgers University, told ABC News that every day after he wakes up, the “first thing I do is go on Robin Hood and check out the app.”

Bublick noted that Robin Hood gets rid of the traditional barriers to entry for people wanting to dabble in the stock market, saying it is “available, basically, to everyone with a smartphone.”

“It makes it accessible to a wide variety of people,” he said. “You don’t have to hit up a normal broker or anything like that to do it. You can do it all from your phone.”

Bublick is also an active reader of the r/wallstreetbets subreddit, saying that while a lot of it is satire or jokes, “I do think that subreddit has a lot of good advice on there once you can kind of sift out what people are just saying in general to kind of take out what’s actually worthwhile.”

Still, the student admitted that a lot of his trading ideas are “very impulsive,” and “a lot of what people do is basically gambling.”

He explained how the community was able to move markets by saying, “they’re pulling it up by posting about it” and that helps “increase the price based on the demand for the shares.”

“Do I think that GameStop is worth $220 a share? No, I do think that retail as a whole in-person is kind of dying out. I mean, I know personally near where I am, I’ve seen probably four or five GameStops shut their doors within the last year or so.”

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Who is talking about investigating reddit users for a perfectly legal activity? Who is defending massive, organized, and blatant attempts at stock price manipulation?

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