This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, January 30th, 2021. I'm Caleb Brown.

In a whirlwind week for some particular stocks, the controversies seem endless. Retail traders

running up troubled stocks putting hedge funds in a squeeze, trading platforms like

Robin Hoods, suspending trades for the suddenly popular stocks and on the bright side

traders might have saved a chain of movie theaters for a generation. Cato's Jennifer Shulp looks

at Wall Street's Wild Week.

The latest twist in the saga of Game Stop and AMC and other stocks

on which a lot of big investors are short is that Robin Hood and a

number of other platforms that purport to provide the people with opportunities to make trades and make some money

shut it down or shut down at least trades on a few of these stocks, the signal obviously from a lot of people

when you name your app Robin Hood, the assumption is that it's okay to take from the rich and give to the poor, but they

were shutting these trades down.

Do we have any better idea now why that was happening? We do and it presents a bunch of

tough questions say from the outside it's always interesting when you get an issue

that Alexandria O'Kaseo Cortez and Ted Cruz agree on to stand up and be angry

at Robin Hood for shutting down the trading.

And as a matter of principle, I completely agree that the trading should be allowed to happen.

We want investors to be able to make their own trading decisions,

particularly on these platforms, and particularly where the market is volatile.

But there's other issues at play and kind of after market close or late in the day yesterday,

Weebel, Robin Hood, all kind of gave a little bit more color to the decision that needed to happen,

to the decision that they made.

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