@Kranar exactly. the actions of the gme swarm are reasonable given the positions and the patterns of actions we all recognize from short sellers. until now, short sellers have pretty much been playing a game of poker where no one ever called their bluff. Of course, the short sellers that lost out on this can just blame it on covid and get bailed out.
They're not reasonable. Just because someone has a short position doesn't mean you can stake a position deliberately to trigger a squeeze and profit from the result. That's exactly what the GME swarm has been doing.
"Although some short squeezes may occur naturally in the market, a scheme to manipulate the price or availability of stock in order to cause a short squeeze is illegal." - https://www.sec.gov/investor/pubs/regsho.htm
I wouldn't be surprised if Robinhood and other brokers' compliance teams made the decision that the penalty for shutting down trading was less than the potential fallout for enabling illegal market manipulation behavior. Just because it's coordinated online between individuals doesn't mean that it's not illegal market manipulation.
