February 7, 2022
As a retail investor, I support this and every form of regulation upon short-selling, lending, derivatives, and fails-to-deliver. However, I am all too aware of the toothlessness of our so-called \"(self) regulatory bodies.\" Retail investors want real change. Not change to the rules that average retail investors are subject to, because those are actually enforced. No, we want change that will hold criminals accountable for the larceny and fraud. \"The market\" is an illusion so long as shares are allowed to be fabricated and then borrowed countless times over without any intention to cover.
There exist massive, highly-profitable loopholes in our capital markets that led to the crisis in '08, which the SEC has known about since before then. Not only have these loopholes been ignored, but so have the laws which are supposed to be applied to the benefactors of these loopholes. One such benefactor, Market Makers, abuse these loopholes today. They are allowed to massively inflate the supply of any given company's float of shares, which artificially suppresses price, and eliminates any utility that those phantom shares should have (voting rights in particular).
This in itself, destroys the price discovery feature of the market, and therefore destroys the market itself. Without true price discovery, we don't have a market.
Moreover, Gary Gensler himself stated: \"95% of retail orders go to dark pools.\" These even-less-regulated systems/exchanges enable market makers and other large entities to manipulate retail orders to their benefit. In the worst case, they could be allowed to short every single share that is supposedly bought by retail through the dark pools, outright suppressing any buy pressure whatsoever. How is this artificial fragmentation allowed to persist? Money.
Retail investors such as myself are becoming painfully, infuriatingly aware of the SEC's gross negligence. More of us are learning every day and the truth can't be hidden forever. We have experts decrying the egregious incompetency of \"enforcement\" of the markets (read Dr. Susanne Trimbath's book \"Naked, Short, and Greedy\"). We have been the subjects of propaganda narratives spun by large media outlets to cover for the elites who benefit. We are fed up.