For Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C. 10th District), ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee and proponent of more open financial markets, the GameStop trading frenzy presents an opportunity to further democratize investing.
"This is a true power-of-the-people moment, where you see Reddit users… that communicated with each other about what large sophisticated hedge funds were doing to a particular stock, and so they took action," McHenry told Cheddar.
The committee will hold hearings on the incident in the next two to three weeks, according to McHenry. The goal, he said, is to better understand if there are any legal issues to address and if the David-and-Goliath media narratives pass the muster of closer scrutiny.
"We need to understand if any laws were broken, if any regulations were broken here, and what exactly happened with this larger moment of Reddit users outsmarting and outwitting hedge funds," he said.
The representative also stressed that the hearing would not focus on a single company, such as Robinhood, which has gotten heavy criticism from fellow lawmakers on both sides of the aisle for limiting trading activity of Reddit-targeted stocks in the middle of the buying spree.
Robinhood CEO Vladimir Tenev recently said in a conversation with Elon Musk that the restrictions were meant to help the company conform to capital requirements. McHenry said regulations concerning capital requirements for broker-dealers could also be on the docket.
"We have to make sure that the regulations are appropriate for broker-dealers to hold capital," he said. "We need to understand the clearing process."
Ultimately, he said it should be easier for newcomers, such as the wave of investors who piled into GameStop stocks, to take advantage of financial markets.
"What this moment shows me is that average, everyday investors can be quite sophisticated, and simply having a wealth standard is not a sufficient mechanism," he said. "We need to ensure that people can test into the accredited investor standard, so that these average, everyday investors can get those deeper, earlier access to sophisticated products."
Dating app Bumble announced its first acquisition, expanding into Europe by picking up Fruitz, a French Platform. The Fruitz app allows its users to convey dating preferences through fruit metaphors.
Meat production giant Tyson Foods reported a beat on its Q1 earnings. In spite of obstacles posed by supply chain issues and inflation, the company exceeded expectations on earnings per share and revenue.
TC BioPharm, a biopharmaceutical company focused on developing cell therapy products targeting, went public on the Nasdaq in January. CEO Bryan Kobel joined Cheddar to talk about the company's IPO launch, its cancer-fighting therapeutics tech, and its potential for using its research to treat COVID-19. "The opportunity here for us is to really get safety data and covid and expand into other areas," Kobel said. "So from COVID, where we hope to treat patients, hopefully maybe the elderly population, populations that that really can't handle the antivirals because they're too hard in the system, well then we'll expand out into maybe severe influenza Ebola, other viral and viral infections where we think we can be helpful."
The gaming industry has been under the spotlight so far this year following some big mergers and acquisitions. This week featured earnings of three major gaming companies, but also Meta and for the latter, things are not doing too hot. Joining Cheddar News to break it all down was Kenny Rosenblatt, President and Co-Founder of Arkadium.
Following the surprising big beat on estimates for the January jobs report, William M. Rodgers III, vice president and director of the Institute for Economic Equity at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, joined Cheddar News to break down the data. “We ended 2021 with a strong crescendo to a recovery that had taken hold, and we started 2022 in good fashion." He also discussed the dueling pressures of wage growth and inflation.
While it was a volatile week in tech as Meta experienced the biggest one-day drop in the history of the U.S. stock market, industry giant Amazon reported 40 percent growth — largely on the strength of the cloud. Dan Ives, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities, joined Cheddar News to break down how the e-commerce company stock managed to pop despite headwinds against its core retail business. "It's all about cloud because of sum of the parts, you could argue, amazon could be $3,500/$4,000 stock just based on cloud," he said. Ives also addressed the apparent the differing impact of Apple iOS changes on Facebook and Snapchat.
