| Not a trap so much as a way to get your opinions clearly stated in a way that I could follow, instead of back and forthing to define the boundaries. > If you want to argue that he doesn't know that his tweets affect the market, the SEC has already determined that it does The SEC found that as CEO his public statements are considered official announcements, but that doesn’t really say anything about him “being able to affect the market” in general. I believe that would not actually be market manipulation because he was telling the truth - the regulations require fraud or misstatement (lies). They don’t technically require statements to have evidence or even be true, because people can be wrong. > But note that this is different than saying "GME is going to $1000 because of <totally false and made up reasons>" Exactly. Telling other people to invest in something because you believe they can make money at it is not market manipulation so long as you believe what you are telling them. Where people think WSB could get into trouble is actually purchasing the shares - because what is perhaps illegal is the act of making a trade to drive up the price for short sellers and make them buy back stock - and some of them may have said things that show this intent. However this version of manipulation is a very unclear concept - the plain reading of the law makes general trading to make money basically illegal, so it has been heavily interpreted by the courts and there is actually a circuit split on whether any otherwise valid trade can be illegal because of intent. https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/financialregulation/fi... |
I believe there is also thought that this concept could get some people in trouble.
There are a fair number of "sounds right but actually aren't" accusations floating around about GME (along with complete garbage[0]); if you know that these are false statements when syaing them (which in some cases is definitely provable), then you could be in a bind.
[0] I think the most striking example of "complete garbage" that I've seen (but unfortunately can't find any more) is a set of claims that Microsoft is going to acquire GameStop to turn all GameStops into XBox E-Sports lounges. I mean, could it theoretically happen, yes, but I don't think that anyone believes that at all. That's the kind of boiler-room style shit that used to be considered clear-cut fraud.