The possibility of playing casino games anywhere on your smartphone is an incredible benefit that shouldn’t be overlooked. Because every state has its gambling laws, we’ll review where gamblers can play legally, what choices they have, and what they can expect from online gambling in their state. Your mortgage interest may be tax-deductible if you own one. Extreme volatility in stock can indicate suspicious market activity and lead to an SEC investigation. This has never occurred to me, and I have been closely monitoring the market for more than 20 years, with five of them with the Securities and Exchange Commission SEC.

The SEC claimed that a subsidiary of Citigroup of doing this during the 2008 financial crisis, when it excited the price of a financial product that was tied to the housing market, in an attempt to get rid of the product at a price that was exaggerated. This is referred to as a “pump-and-dump” scheme. Some believe this is exactly what investors on Redditor forums were doing when they bought GameStop stock. Redditors found that hedge funds and professional traders were betting that GameStop shares would fall, which is known as shorting a stock. They collaborated to push its share price higher. By the laws that govern the market for stocks manipulating the market happens when someone attempts to create excitement and enthusiasm in a specific stock to convince people to purchase the stock and increase the price.

This “short squeeze” that drove GameStop’s share prices up by thousands of percent in a matter of weeks resulted in professional investors losing billions. They are concerned that the investors were simply trying to create a fierce market to artificially boost the value of the stock so that they can sell it at the new price. This kind of trading, which involves both shorting and squeezes, is often referred to as speculation because it is not related to the value of the company’s assets. Stock exchanges’ stoppages of trading occur fairly frequently but aren’t casino an issue. Brokers may suspend trading in the stock, but it’s not often.