Is this what happens when the bag-holder-of-last-resort is removed from the market?
As we detailed earlier in the year, institutions and hedge funds have been using this exuberant rally in stocks to dump their holdings to retail admirers.
So what happens when arguably the largest retail brokerage – where all the “useful idiots” reside – goes down?
As The Wall Street Journal reports, a technical error at Fidelity Investments on Wednesday blocked millions of customers from their online brokerage accounts.
Attempts to log in were met with an error message reading: “Due to a technical error, the system is temporarily unavailable.”
A spokesperson said that the company is working to resolve an “internal tech issue” affecting all users of the firm’s website and mobile app.
He said it’s unknown when service will be restored.
And the removal of these retail accounts means institutions have no one to dump to… and so this happens…
FANG Stocks suffer their biggest drop in 21 months…
Fidelity is among the largest U.S. online brokerage firms. Its personal investing business had $1.72 trillion in client assets under administration at the end of 2016 and 17.9 million accounts, according to the firm’s most recent annual report.
That’s a lot of bagholders missing from today’s market!