Don’t Derail Small Investors Because of GameStop Furor
Let’s not use this moment to roll back the forces of market democratization.
Let them play.
Photographer: Alex Kraus/Bloomberg
This is what the democratization of investing looks like, and it would be a mistake to turn back now.
I have long argued that everyone should have equal access to financial markets. For too long, Wall Street and U.S. securities laws have openly discriminated against ordinary investors, denying them full access to markets on the theory that they’re too unsophisticated to play in the big leagues. That caricature of retail investors as fools and rubes is wildly misguided, and in any event, excluding ordinary investors from markets on that basis is self-defeating. How can they become more sophisticated without access to markets?