Market integrity, disruptions, innovations and the fallout of Wall Street versus retail traders‪.‬ Finance & Fury Podcast

Welcome to Finance and Fury. In this episode, we are going to look at some of the potential fallouts from the GameStop saga – looking at market disruptions, market integrity and the ongoing implications of potential regulation changes
If you want an overview of this – check out last Mondays episode.
But in short - Gamers are good at playing games – when they know the rules The rules of the financial game are starting to be more understood by people online - Some people on reddit were paying attention to the Form 13F filings in the US for hedge funds – have to be lodged each quarter– saw that GME was heavily shorted by a few funds, The one firm that received the most attention, Melvin Capital had heavy short positions The price of GME has come back down a fair bit from its high point last week, was sitting at around $60 on Friday last week – but there was a gradual increase from around $18 at the start of Jan to around the last week of Jan – when the price started to sky rocket – went up over $400 – triggered a short squeeze where funds were trying to get out of their short positions by buying back the shares – but there either went enough shares, pushing prices up further or you had to accept a massive loss Even buying the shares back at $60 would still result in a big loss – most got into the short positions between $4 and $10 There are some estimates – hard to get a total for all the funds that lost money – but Losses total losses were estimated to be around $70bn from short positions within the hedge fund community – Melvin Capital lost around $13bn of their capital – loss of around 53% in the fund So in this episode – I want to go through the nature of this market disruption, and the greater implications of this – from the market integrity point of view as well as potential regulatory responses  
To start with – discuss the nature of Market disruptions – through innovations
One view that I have about this whole saga is that the disruptions are due to innovations – both human and technological It is a bit of a paradigm shift – humans are adaptive creatures – if a group of online investors managed to push up the price of a company, where some made some decent money, while causing massive losses to institutions, what is to stop this from happening again? When looking at the evolution of humans and technology, it can help to paint a picture of what may happen next in financial markets – the basic trend occurs as follows: Disruptive companies or trends start- normally start small or at the low end of a market – these start out with a focused/niche group Existing powers that be (companies or groups in the social dynamic) ignore this new competition – mainly because it is small – so either poses no threat to the loss of customers or there aren’t enough people to affect change Over time successful trends or disruptor climb the value chain – with companies, they offering better products and services, with social groups, it also provides value – community or prestige Eventually – these disruptors grow to a point of being legitimate competition - the existing powers that be either fail or adopt the disruptor’s models, and the whole cycle starts over again Much more to this cycle – but when viewing the recent rise in retail trading through this model – it is following a pretty classic disruption model The emerging disruptive trend in markets – coming from retail investors in combination with technology – have access to low/no cost trading platforms as well as chat sites/social media that binds them together – so they can move trades as one They have been overlooked by the powers that be – relatively small -but when taken at the aggregate level, especially now with stimulus checks coming in – they each have an additional $2k ($1,400 more coming on top of the initial $600) As a group – the common knowledge of gambling and gam