How the Finance Regulatory Authority is Supposedly Protecting Retail Investors Is What They Are Doing

You may be familiar with the GameStop and AMC fiasco that happened in 2021 when Robinhood, a stock trading app, halted investors’ ability to buy or sell their stocks while those stocks were significantly rising in price. Robinhood used this tactic to screw over investors and protect their hedge fund friends on Wall Street. Investors began to ask themselves these questions. “If brokerages and the regulator agencies allowed this to happen, can they get away with anything?” 

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), a year and a quarter later, answered that question with a resounding “yes”. They stopped the selling and buying of a Series A preferred dividend for Meta Materials Inc. ($MMTLP). We’ll get into what happened shortly, but it’s important to understand who FINRA Is and how they have a direct role in what happened to $MMTLP and its investors.

FINRA’s mission is “To protect investors and ensure the market’s integrity. We work every day to ensure that everyone can participate in the market with confidence.” When we look at what happened to Meta Materials Inc. this year and $MMTLP last year, one keyword to remember is “everyone.”

Shorting Torchlight

Torchlight Energy Resources Inc. was the first company to be listed on NASDAQ. They have 97,500 acres in Texas’ Orogrande Basin. This land was presented as one the largest. discoveries of oil and gas Since the 1970s, U.S. soil has been home to this oil. It is estimated to have 3.2 billion barrels worth of oil recoverable, and a surplus of natural gasoline. Their stock price was experiencing unusual trading patterns due to heavy shorting despite all the positive news from Torchlight. Their stock price dropped to $0.20/share. They struggled to raise capital necessary to continue drilling wells and to meet their drilling requirements.

John Brda, Torchlight CEO and founder of Torchlight Oil and Gas Company had to take drastic measures to save the company and their oil and gas gold mine. They made the right decision. merge Meta Materials Inc., a Canadian company that develops high-tech materials for nanocomposite products and other high-tech materials.

Torchlight shareholders got a special, non-tradeable benefit from this merger dividend These would be converted into cash when the Torchlight oil- and gas assets are sold. A total of 165,472,241 extra dividends were distributed. This is an important number. Since the stock was heavily shorted, the short positions that caused Torchlight’s stock to drop to $0.20 did not close out their positions when they were supposed to. An estimated 30 million shares were missing from the market that had not been closed. This illegal and naked shorting has only gotten worse.

Following the approval of the SEC’s merger legal structure, Torchlight shareholders began to see a temporary non-tradeable dividend placeholder ($MMTLP). John Brda, Torchlight CEO, said that he received a call in October 2021 asking him to look into his brokerage account. Brda explains the whole situation in 48 minutes