WallStreetBets founder: Meme stock trading isn't market manipulation

Brian Sozzi · Executive Editor

Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 9:28 AM 2 min read

"I mean what is market manipulation? You have people that are buying and you have people that are selling, right? If you have a fraudulent intent — if somebody goes up there and lies and says oh, BlackBerry has this new hologram cellphone that does whatever and it's a lie, that is market manipulation. And that's fraud," WallStreetBets founder Jaime Rogozinski said on Yahoo Finance Live. "But people coming together and saying let's just push this price to the moon and being really transparent and no defrauding taking place, that is absolutely what the market is."

Rogozinski founded the popular Reddit trading forum WallStreetBets in 2012. At the time, Rogozinski was single and looking for a more active way to trade investment ideas inside a community. Enter WallStreetBets.

While Rogozinski is no longer affiliated with WallStreetBets (the platform was becoming a bit too rowdy for his liking), to say his influence lives on in the trading world is an understatement.

WallStreetBets has become the digital trading desk of choice among a new generation of investors who are aggressively pushing up shares of struggling companies such as AMC, GameStop and BlackBerry.

And this group with its own eclectic language not unlike that found on Wall Street trading floors continues to cash in on its growing influence.

AMC shares are up more than 2,000% this year, despite the company selling shares several times (which would normally lead to a sell-off) to capitalize. GameStop's stock has surged more than 1,000% on the year as traders firmly believe new chairman and former Chewy founder Ryan Cohen could transform the company.

Said Rogozinski on the meme stock movement, "You have now a collective of millions of market beta testers on the actual stock market, making it more efficient and making it more productive."

Brian Sozzi is an editor-at-large and anchor at Yahoo Finance. Follow Sozzi on Twitter @BrianSozzi and on LinkedIn.

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