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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 all

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.

gruez 6y ago
>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-legal-take-on-the-trolley-problem https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/1639/what-is-the-leg...

gruez 6y ago

>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-legal-take-on-the-trolley-problem https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/1639/what-is-the-leg...