>IMO, it should be illegal to facilitate only selling or only buying. Brokers should be forced to offer both or neither.

Just because you shut down trading at one brokerage doesn't mean the price is frozen. It could still drop like a rock, and you'd still end up with a bunch of pissed off customers saying that they couldn't exit in time.

Yeah, but at least you as a broker wouldn't have a hand in the price change. If they piss off their customers who wanted to sell, that's just how it is. That will give them an incentive to keep both options open instead of restricting traders to only buying or only selling when it suits them.

>Yeah, but at least you as a broker wouldn't have a hand in the price change. If they piss off their customers who wanted to sell, that's just how it is

No, the price change occurred when new money couldn't flow into GME, due to deposit requirements. Stopping sells when there isn't any technical reason to do so is also an intervention, and arguably a bigger one.

> That will give them an incentive to keep both options open instead of restricting traders to only buying or only selling when it suits them.

And doing the reverse suits the HODLers, who would love nothing more than to prevent others from breaking rank and tanking the stock price, but sucks for everyone else who wants to get off the wild ride. On Thursday MUST asset management sold off its stake in GME. If people weren't allowed to get out, and it tanked further, I could easily imagine accusations that robinhood was doing it to the benefit of wall st firms, to eliminate competition for sells.

I believe you're missing the big picture here.

If a broker only allows purchases of a stock, they push the trajectory of that stock value up. If they only allow sales, they push the trajectory down. Brokers should not have the power to affect the trajectory of a stock. It is a conflict of interest for their business.

Yes, it would absolutely suck for stock holders if sales were restricted while the price was decreasing. In addition to not being able to exclusively restrict buying or selling, brokers should also probably be made partially liable for losses incurred as a result of restrictions on sales. It should also be a huge hit to their brand when they are forced to lock down a stock because of liquidity issues.

But at the end of the day, it is a conflict of interest for brokers to artificially affect stock values. What they did is not currently illegal (so far as I can tell), and it may not have even been their intent to manipulate the market, but there's no way around it. That is exactly what happened.

>But at the end of the day, it is a conflict of interest for brokers to artificially affect stock values.

The problem is that restricting sells unnecessarily can also be construed as artificially affecting stock values, even though it might produce less net change overall. An extreme example would be if the sell/buy functionality were handled by different servers, and only the "buy" servers caught fire. Do you shut down the "sell" server as well to preserve market balance, even though they're working fine and there's no risk to them? In that case the legal system definitely prefers doing nothing (or less) than more. See law stackexchange's take on the trolley problem, which I believe is similar. https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/1639/what-is-the-leg...

You could still buy if you were short (close your position). And allegedly there's many more shorts than long positions.

Absolutely. Just imagine the inverse scenario here where they had a conflict of interest in a long position and turned off selling. Turning off both is fine if they’re not able to legally handle new buys. But just turning off buys is also pretty freaking sus.