Hello and welcome. You are listening to Patrick Boyle on Finance, a podcast exploring ideas from quantitative finance, examining events occurring in markets right now and financial history to see what lessons can be taken away, including interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world of finance. To learn more about the podcast, visit onfinance.org.

On Monday, the SEC released their GameStop report. They didn't call it that, though. They called it

the staff report on equity and options market structure conditions in early 2021, and that's

just because the SEC don't do clickbait. It's actually quite a good read though, but it is also

45 pages long, so I'll quickly tell you what I learned from reading it, and I'll leave a link

to the full report in the description.

There are a lot of interesting things in there such as the number of traders who participated

in the squeeze, detail on the online conversations, explanations as to why market halls occurred,

and insights as to how market makers traded back in January.

To me the most interesting part was the extent to which the price rise was unrelated to short

covering.

It was also interesting that a lot of hedge funds participated on the long side, which was

the opposite to what was being reported at the time.

There are quite a few explainers in the report as to the dynamics of broker margins, market

maker behaviours and explanations as to how short interest could and did get above 100%.

I discussed many of those things on YouTube at the time, but if you're watching this and

new to trading or investing, you'll probably learn quite a lot about how markets work

by reading the full report.

Now the report came out on Monday and obviously the squeeze in meme stocks is still an ongoing

event.

In fact, based on the report, the volume-weighted average price of GameStop

during its big squeeze in the last week of January was $166.23. Right now, it's trading

...