Five years later and we’re still pretending January ’21 was just “volatility” and not a full-blown stress test that exposed how fragile (and how conflicted the plumbing of this market really is)
Vlad, you can publish all the polished retrospectives you want. Retail didn’t hallucinate the buy button disappearing. Liquidity didn’t magically evaporate for no reason. When brokers that sell order flow to the very firms taking the other side of customer trades run into “capital issues” at the exact moment their users are winning, people notice.
You can call it risk management. You can call it clearing requirements.
What it looked like was this: when the trade hurt the right institutions, the rules changed mid-game.
And let’s talk about narratives. For years, anyone questioning short interest reporting, fails-to-deliver, or off-exchange volume concentration got labeled a conspiracy theorist. Meanwhile, internalization keeps growing, price discovery keeps getting murkier, and somehow retail is supposed to believe the system is more fair than ever.
You don’t get to rewrite history just because time passed. Trust in markets is earned with transparency and aligned incentives, not PR campaigns and selective memory.
Retail learned a lot in 2021. About clearinghouses. About collateral. About who actually sits between them and “the market.” That knowledge doesn’t go away, and neither does the skepticism.
You can minimize it. You can joke about it. You can distance yourself from it.
But the bill for broken trust in financial markets always comes due in participation, in liquidity, and eventually in regulation.
#GME #MarketTransparency #PowerToThePlayers