Market Pulse Saturday Supplement

What Does It Mean to the 99% of People Who Don’t Have Insider Knowledge, Legal or Not?

Key Points:

The Legal Elite of Influential Traders: Today’s most aggressive traders aren’t just Wall Street veterans; they are a tight-knit ecosystem of tech founders, VC partners, and social media influencers who leverage privileged information and regulatory loopholes to amplify market swings in their favor.
The Architecture of Public Manipulation: These groups manipulate stock prices not through classic fraud, but by combining aggressive, algorithmic short-selling with highly coordinated, and often anonymous, campaigns on social media platforms, turning “public opinion” into a tool for proprietary gain.
A “Market Pulse” Path for the 99%: Enhancing the 99% doesn’t mean finding our own “insider” advantage; it requires a systemic shift toward a truly diversified, policy-insulated “market of value” and the establishment of a “U.S. Retirement Infrastructure Fund,” giving everyday investors a direct stake in non-volatile, essential economic drivers.

The stock market as it exists on March 28, 2026, is not the impartial and efficient pricing mechanism that standard economic theory describes. It is a terrain that has been structurally optimized to reward specific cohorts that possess structural advantages. This reality raises a fundamental question of justice and equity: what does it mean to be among the 99% of American and European citizens whose financial futures—their retirements, their homes, their ability to afford a crisis—are inexorably tied to this market, yet who have absolutely no way to participate in, let alone benefit from, the information asymmetries that now define it?

The current period of intense volatility has stripped away the illusion of a level playing field. The 99% are not merely observers; they are the participants whose passive capital (often in the form of retirement contributions and ETFs) provides the liquidity that the 1% of aggressive traders need to execute their high-volume, information-advantaged strategies. The standard financial advice to “buy and hold” has, by 2026, been shown to often be the fuel that funds the sophisticated selling of those with a clearer view of the road. To build a market that truly works for the average person, we must first unmask the aggressors and the nature of their trades, and then redefine what it means to “legally manipulate” the system for the common good.

The Aggressors and Their Playbook: Elite Influencers and Algorithmic Allies

When we speak of “aggressors,” we are no longer referring just to the traditional stockbroker from decades past. The aggressors of 2026 are a far more sophisticated and integrated alliance. They include:

Founder-Executives and Private Equity Groups: These are the ultimate insiders. People like the founders of AI-startups that just went public, or partners at massive venture capital firms like Sequoia or Andreessen Horowitz. They have non-public insights into regulatory headwinds, product development bottlenecks, or customer pipelines that are weeks, if not months, ahead of the public.
High-Frequency, Algorithmic Trading Firms: These institutions, such as Citadel or Virtu Financial, use advanced mathematical models and near-instantaneous trade execution to profit from microseconds of price discrepancy. Their algorithms are designed to exploit the very “flash” volatility that devastates 401(k)s, treating market movement not as a reflection of value, but as a tradeable asset.
Elite Social Media Influencer Cartels: This is the newest and most dangerous development. This group is a tight-knit ecosystem of traders with large, anonymous social media following on platforms like X, specialized Discord channels, or even decentralized finance (DeFi) communities. They are often funded by, or aligned with, the aforementioned VCs or founder-groups. Their role is to “prime the market.” They use social media as a tool of coordinated influence, not legitimate analysis. An anonymous “whisper” that a major AI player is hitting a specific supply chain bottleneck can cause a coordinated, rapid-fire selloff on social media, amplifying the very trend the algorithmic firms have programmed for.

These groups form a symbiotic relationship. One group provides the “why” (information about tech headwinds), another provides the “how” (high-volume algorithms to create a cascade), and the social media cartel provides the “fuel” (the public narrative that encourages or panics retail investors).

How the Manipulation Plays Out: Leveraging Legality as a Shield

The crux of the current market structure is that this aggressive behavior is, with rare exceptions, completely legal. It is the sophisticated application of public platforms and regulatory frameworks to create an “elite insider loop” that the public cannot join.

For instance, an executive might legally set up an SEC 10b5-1 selling plan months in advance, but then, seeing their company’s AI project stall internally, subtly share that skepticism with their VC network. The VCs, in turn, may use their proprietary data analytics to identify similar stalling trends in their other portfolio companies. They begin to systematically (and legally) trim their positions in high-growth tech ETFs. This massive “insider selling by another name” creates downward pressure. Then, the social media cartels activate, using anonymized accounts to highlight “technical breakdown” signals or share data snippets suggesting a “peak AI” narrative. The public, seeing the falling stock and the coordinated social narrative, rushes to sell. The 99%’s mass selling is the final stage that maximizes the profits of the aggressors who initiated the de-risking in the first place. This is not “insider trading” of specific news on a specific date; it is the strategic leverage of an informed perspective on a systemic trend. The regulators cannot stop it because the components—legal plans, macro-analysis, and social media commentary—are each, in isolation, permissible.

The Impact on the 99%: Passive Risk and Wealth Decay

The way this plays out for the 99% is not through immediate bankruptcy, but through systemic wealth decay and anxiety. Passive, diversified vehicles like 401(k)s and Target Date Funds are the primary shock absorbers of this aggressive trading. As funds rebalance quarterly or annually, they are structurally required to buy the very “hot” stocks the aggressors have just decided are overvalued and sell, or catch the falling knives.

When the market experiences institutional “crowding” and subsequent “flash” volatility, it is the passive funds that catch the loss. The 99% can only watch as their portfolios swing wildly based on the sentiment loops of this elite trading loop. Over time, this erodes the compounding magic that long-term investing promises. High volatility, inflation, and future tax uncertainty (the result of needing to tax the 99% to manage the public debt that supports the economy this elite market rests upon) create a “retirement gap” and profound long-term risk for those who cannot move in and out of the market with high-speed precision.

How to Legally Manipulate the Market to Enhance the 99%

The current market structure is optimized to funnel capital to the best and fastest movers. This is the definition of efficiency for capital allocators, but it is not optimal for the stable wealth creation needed by the 99%. A market truly designed for the common good requires us to change the structure of the instruments and the incentives to favor stability and value over speed and informed momentum. Here is how that could be legally manipulated for the common good:

The Rise of “Public-Value Aggregation Funds”: We must move retirement vehicles away from indices that reward the fastest-moving, winner-take-all tech stocks. Governments could incentivize the creation of “Public-Value” indices that aggregate companies based not on market cap, but on metrics like sustainable employment creation, public research and development partnerships, and capital reinvestment within domestic boundaries. Aggregating the 99% into these funds would structurally “manipulate” the market to reward long-term stability and tangible economic contributions, reducing exposure to the ” informed momentum” of an elite trading loop.
The “U.S. Retirement Infrastructure Fund”: If we accept that the public (the 99%) provides the liquidity and the taxes that support the entire economy, the public should have a direct, non-volatile stake in the most essential parts of that economy. A “Retirement Infrastructure Fund” could be created, funded by tax-deductible contributions (similar to 401(k)s), but dedicated solely to non-volatile, essential economic assets: public energy grid modernization, water infrastructure, essential logistics hubs, and domestic, public research. These are long-term, cash-flow-predictable assets that the 99% are already dependent on. Giving them a direct, non-tradeable ownership stake in this infrastructure provides a stable, predictable, and inflation-protected foundation for retirement wealth, completely insulating it from the “pump-and-dump” and legal manipulation of public-equity markets.
A Transaction Tax for Algorithmic Micro-Volatility: To disincentivize the systemic manipulation that relies on speed and volume, a small (e.g., 0.1%) tax could be placed on high-frequency, algorithm-driven, short-term trades. This “sand in the gears” would make the micro-volatility that algorithmic firms rely on less profitable, subtly manipulating the market back toward human timescales, fundamental value, and long-term investment holding periods, which are the only structures in which the 99% can reasonably compete.