SEC Reportedly Looking Into Robinhood President’s Sale Of AMC Stock

Late last night, in a lengthy post summarizing all the recent fabrication spewed forth from the Citadel-Robinhood complex, we asked a simple question: Did the president of Robinhood dump all his AMC stock right before they restricted trading.

The reason for the question is that on page 4 of the amended class action lawsuit complaint (docket 21-2989) we read that ahead of Robinhood’s infamous halt of trading of over a dozen memo stocks, Robinhood Securities President and COO, James (Jim) Swartwout said in an internal chat on January  26, 2021, “I sold my AMC today. FYI  –  tomorrow morning we are moving GME to 100% – so you are aware.”

Fast forward just a few hours when, at least according to Charlie Gasparino, the answer is not only a resounding yes, but the SEC is already looking into it. According to the Fox Business reporter, “employee trading scrutinized by @SEC_Enforcement includes those by the firm’s prez Jim Swartwout, who sold shares of $AMC during the meme stock frenzy.” In response, the position of Robinhood – whose mission is “to to democratize finance for all” but mostly its own top employees – claims that the trades “aren’t illegal.”

BREAKING: Sources tell @FoxBusiness the @RobinhoodApp employee trading scrutinized by @SEC_Enforcement includes those by the firm’s prez Jim Swartwout, who sold shares of $AMC during the meme stock frenzy. Sources say $HOOD‘s position is the trades arent illegal. Story developing

— Charles Gasparino (@CGasparino) September 30, 2021

Keep a close eye on this, especially since the torrent of tweets from Robinhood’s alleged partner in crime, Citadel, continues with another two this afternoon, in which the hedge fund-slash-internalizer once again went for the ad hominem, slamming “conspiracy theorists” – very much the same way it slandered this website a year ago when it threatened to sue us for claiming it was frontrunning its clients… until FINRA proved us right – for “churning baseless theories.”

According to Citadel, “we FIRST learned of Robinhood’s trading restrictions from posts on Twitter – as evidenced by real-time communications. Our primary Robinhood point person had to ask Robinhood if the Twitter posts on the trading restrictions were “fact or fiction?”“

Our primary Robinhood point person had to ask Robinhood if the Twitter posts on the trading restrictions were “fact or fiction?” pic.twitter.com/khHHO1STSz

— Citadel Securities (@citsecurities) September 30, 2021

Which, however, immediately prompted even more questions: how can the time stamp on the chat log say 8:39am EST when the timestamp on the Robinhood tweet is some 80 minutes later, or 9:56am.

Maybe when in a hole, Citadel should stop digging, or at least tweeting.