“GameStop” & Donald Trump Are the Same — Both Hijacked a Rigged Game
Is America Up to the Task of Reforming Both the GOP and the Options Markets?
GameStop and Donald Trump are the same thing.
In both cases, outsiders saw a decaying, billionaire-run and corrupt insider-only system, figured out how it worked, and used that system’s own corruption against it.
In the case of GameStop, it was the Robinhood app’s relatively small technological innovation, or at least a business innovation, making it easy for average middle-class people to day-trade in the options market with virtually no fees and a friendly interface.
These “average person” outsiders on Reddit discovered that the stock options betting market had been cornered and rigged by a few dozen billionaires and their hedge funds, so they used Robinhood to place massive option bets against the billionaires, swinging the market itself.
Options trading started out as an important part of our economy, particularly for farmers, railroads and food processors. Farmers would sell an option to buy crops they’d just planted in the hopes of predictably getting a decent price for their work when their crops came in in the fall. Such commodity trades let railroads anticipate load and guaranteed food…
