Meanwhile, online brokerage Webull continues to boast that it had no trouble operating throughout the whole mania. Founded in 2016 initially as a market data platform, Webull has over 500 engineers in its research and development centre in Changsha, China, and operates on cloud technology. Its army of engineers and developers has played an integral role in ensuring technical continuity of its platform since its inception.
The Gamestop saga of 2021 marked one of the biggest David vs Goliath moments in the global stock market history — when retail investors on the Reddit forum r/WallStreetBets banded together to drive the stock price of Gamestop up, causing a major headache for the short-sellers banking on the stock falling.
From that, a big lesson materialised: the emerging class of retail investors using digital platforms to trade presented a big opportunity for trading platforms to cater to. US trading platform Robinhood was the name attached to the saga, and it, along with other brokerages, was afflicted by outages during the frenzy and buckled under higher-than-usual traffic.
