It seems like it should be easy enough to get those financial advisors for market manipulation.

One would think until you see the actual suits brought against these entities where, just like fox they argue its purely for entertainment purposes and any rational person would understand this and not treat it as truth (i.e think when cramer called bear sterns a great investment about a week before tanking, or the fact we have an etf which does the opposite of cramer that makes like a 20% yield ytd). It’s fucked to say the least in that regard.

If a large firm says a stock will do better than otherwise expected and then sells their clients’ stocks as soon as the price rises, how is it anything except simple market manipulation?

the world of venture capital and algorithmic trading has entered the room

Yeah it’s not done that simply. The basic game plan is as follows:

You never tell your clients directly what is great or not you point them to journals which can pump out articles like MontleyFool or yahoo finance who love their little disclaimer of this is not financial advise. Once you have primed the clients to want to invest for this upcoming ipo the next steps can follow: See YOU don’t have to sell the stock when your funds are managed by a trading algorithm like Aladin used by all your big firms from Blackrock to Citadel, because now you get to say it was an automatic sale based on risk assessment made by your algorithm with zero human interaction. So, you had your buddies in the VC world give inflated investment offers to the budding company in question, allow a couple rounds of investments with some nice articles about put out from those financial jourals along this journey, which serves a dual purpose one allow other firms to persuade investment from clients and two that when the company decides to go public their growth goals become untenable and the initial IPO crashes. You as a VC want to hedge your bet right? So you make some equity swap deals with some unsuspecting banks under a couple of different shell corporations. These swaps allow you to essentially open a net short position, but thanks to some great CFTC regulations that came out barring reporting requirements on these swaps it’s been even harder to see what’s inside them. As an addition, since these are equity swaps, the bank does not need to report their position to the SEC nor does the entity in question who created this swap with the bank in the first place as they technically don’t own the assets on hand (this is how archegos blew up and took creddit suise along with it). Now when the IPO hits your buddies down at the hedge fund’s algorithms are going to see the risk in the reported financial data from the IPO and the over valued IPO share price. Place in some articles from something like the MontleyFool about how all of a sudden this IPO doesn’t look so great and those VCs are going be screwed. Now you have the ammo, tools, and contracts set up to profit from the downside of this IPO. Then as a bonus by utilizing derivatives, you can short more than a hundred percent of a companies shares allowing you to profit in your equity swaps that have been going unreported obscenely. Now your coffer is full again you can pick up the next chump who is claiming to be the next ‘Steve jobs’ or at least pickup their assets for penny on the dollar when the company proceeds to bankruptcy. Then by the beauty of delisted stocks and warehoused FTDs on stocks who have been delisted no one ever has to know you shorted the fuck out of a company nor do you ever need to by back the ‘shares’ remember the scheme takes advantage of derivatives which bet on the price of a stock and allow you to buy/sell the shares at the price the contract was for.

There is a lot more nuance here in practice and some aspects were simplified for brevity sake, even if it already seems like a wall of text. The simple answer is its not simple to prosecute and yes the SEC is a mainly captured organization. Gary Gensler has been making strides in some regards but your previous heads, people like Hester Pierce and the constant revolving door from regulator to head executive at trading firms shows another issue with the system. Read the comments on SEC proposals. Another decent starting point if you haven’t had any exposure to these issues is taking a look into the problem with Jon Stewart and his episode on the stock market. It’s not perfect but can give you some insights into how rife with conflict of interest wall street and the SEC truly are.