Opinion: Blame for Fidelity’s mysterious GameStop lies with a company you never suspect

But if you’re Fidelity Investments – and you’ve spent most of 2021 attracting a steady stream of retail investors, that’s in large part thanks to Robinhood’s
HOOD,
-7.75%

January troubles resulted in trading restrictions on names that were popular at the height of meme-stock shorts – the last thing you want to do is give those retail Monkeys a reason to distrust into you.

And you definitely don’t want to do that on a stock like GameStop
GME,
-8.34%.

That makes it rather frustrating to see that a growing Apes retail team has spent most of Tuesday morning ignoring macro bloodbath on indexes and dig deep into what they consider to be glaring differences on Fidelity’s platform in regards to GameStop.

“WTF?! WHO CAN EXPLAIN WHERE THESE SHARES FROM? Users queried Hamberere on the GameStop subredddit r/Superstonk late Tuesday morning, sharing a screenshot of their Fidelity account, showing nearly 13,767,545 shares available.

For the pro-GME monkeys who spent 10 months trying to stop short sellers from taking GameStop stock – and going even further by switching their accounts to Fidelity and even register directly to keep them unlocked – this is an amazingly high amount of available stock and over 2 million available on Monday night.

Reddit low-keys exploded as users speculated that the stock they tried to lend to DRS was being lent by Fidelity, or that the brokerage company misled them in other ways, or that some major hedge fund had covered it up. Its short position (it’s a tough one to buy as the stock has now dropped more than 19% over the past five days).

Fidelity appeared to have spent Tuesday experiencing a flood of calls from angry retail investors and suffered a bad day on social media, as something went wrong with GameStop. in 2021.

And the company’s early efforts have failed to assuage anxiety, with a midday response to angry customers on Reddit explaining how Fidelity calculates available shares, which most Reddit does. Apes are clearly aware so far.

But by the afternoon, the matter was clarified.

“Today, Nov. 30, our trading slips incorrectly reflect the amount of GME shares available for short sale,” reads a post on Fidelity’s own subreddit, posted shortly after 3:30 p.m. Domain Winter. “After studying volumes with our lending services team, we were able to determine that the root cause was one of our external partners entering the wrong number of shares available for sale. . The issue was fixed at 12:10 p.m. ET today. The GME stock available for sale is now correct on the trading slip. ”

And the company even clarifies perhaps the most important concern for retailers.

“We can confirm that the number of shares borrowed never exceeds the actual amount available.”

While that explanation is more complete, it’s not so great.

And Wet Dirt Kurt is not alone, clarifying that Wednesday’s social media will almost certainly be flooded with some internet investigation to find the external partner at fault for the error; one post provided clues as to which speculation would prevail:

“Leaked photo of Fidelity intern in charge of data entry,” posted on r/Superstonk and accompanied by a headshot of Citadel/Ape archenemey founder Ken Griffin, taken with a curly mustache.

But Reddit caused a stir with an incentivized campaign among the Apes to continue to directly register their GME shares and keep them from anyone looking to borrow and short sell them.

That campaign was ramped up Tuesday afternoon, and Fidelity ended up with a hole in his father’s famous armor.

Wednesday should be interesting for everyone involved.

UPDATE: Wednesday is interesting as we learn who the mystery partner came in the evening… and that may be a name no one is on their list of suspects.

“Due to a secretarial data entry error, yesterday we provided Fidelity with incorrect “potential securities lending” data to Gamestop (GME),” a Vanguard spokesperson wrote in a statement. exclusive claim. “The bug was fixed shortly after and before the market opened. We regret this lapse and apologize for any confusion this may have caused.”

So, in the end, it turns out that the glaring difference is a data jolt between Fidelity and Vanguard, possibly the hottest eccentric and drama-disgusting names in the American financial industry.

However, Thursday is almost upon us and we are ready for all the hot stuff,