Lurker > red sox 777

Also kicking myself for not investing in IPOE on Thursday. That is the SPAC that is merging with SoFi. Chamath says that SoFi is committed to letting people trade freely. Unfortunately for me it was up 24% on Friday and up more after hours. I may have to break my guideline about not buying a stock that has already surged.

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StartTheMachine posted...

Did Melvin really close out of their position now? My thesis was based entirely upon that they hadn't, so doing something like that would simply be entirely to help their buddies out.

Anyway, it's just a silly conspiracy theory. The real thing that will happen if it gets high enough is the usual race to close positions earlier than everyone else before the inevitable plummet. The whales and experienced traders will do this anyway, and the people who turned $10k into like millions on their first stock will learn the hard way what can happen. WSB will be a sad place that day. I hope I'm wrong and those first time investors don't get fucked...just can't imagine it not happening.

So pointless to hold GME beyond 500 if it hits that again imo because 2x gains are not really THAT hard.

Melvin isn't that big in the grand scheme of things. There would appear to be are a lot of other hedge funds in this. Melvin would have gotten out because any higher would totally bankrupt them.

As for the race to get out quickly....that also applies to the sell side. The first hedge fund to throw in the towel and submit a massive buy to cover order probably gets out at an average price around $500, say. The second would do much worse because the first fund's buying has already sent the price soaring. And so on. It'll be interesting to see how this dyanamic plays out.

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StartTheMachine posted...

Now that there are hedge funds long in GME, I have a conspiracy theory that if the SP gets real high, they might purposely activate a new short position and then dump their long positions hard, assuming they have a shitton of shares now to drive down the price.

Is that a realistic possibility? Feels like something they would do

Why would they do that? Hedge funds with long positions would rather profit off their long positions. And they are going to make a killing on this trade when they sell their long stock into the short squeeze as short side firms cover.

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There has to be something wrong with that data on CTRM right? It goes from 290k shares shorted to 25 million in 2 weeks. That looks like a typo.

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CoolCly posted...

red sox, you were saying you think this will result in a pull down of other stocks? Presumably because a squeeze will damage large hedgefunds enough to pull out their investments?

Maybe parking my gains in ETF's right now isn't a good idea after all....

Yes, but it's already happened to a significant degree Wednesday and Friday last week. I'm kicking myself for not selling some of my other positions on Thursday since I was thinking this on Thursday. Just got too tired up with work and the stress of following the ridiculous variance on GME and politics to put some time and energy into making up my mind on it. But now I don't want to sell a dip which I believe has nothing to do with the fundamentals, so I'm probably just holding.

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LordoftheMorons posted...

https://twitter.com/kaitlancollins/status/1355701281042681856?s=21

Trump wants a trial on the issue of the election and I guess he will get one. Makes it easier to convict though if he admits he did it and argues it was justified.

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Nanis23 posted...

Just a heads up for people that care about non-meme stocks-
I am following some Israeli Telegram and online forums, some people who are very good at TA are super concered about the closing of Friday. They pretty much said that all major indicies closed below the "support" of "the tunnel" or whatever other bullshit that TA is
And this is the first sign of a correction coming
One of the people that said this is the guru of the forum. He also predicted the COVID market crash like a month before. I know that in hindsight it sounds like "well, duh" but US Stock Market kept on breaking new records up until the 20th of Feburary, and he warned the whole way

But I don't know. I am taking him seriously but...I just don't "feel" like a crash is coming. I felt it very well in Feburary 2020 and I don't feel this now. Maybe I am wrong.
They are very concered about the high exposure that the stock market gets in the last 2 weeks. They are very concered about Robinhood actions. And if those "meme stocks" are really going to fuck hedge firms and they are going to sell the normal stocks they are holding this might lead to a collapse
(Also people leaving Robinhood and selling their stocks so they can leave to another broker easily)
And the VIX doesn't look good either. Two days ago was the 3rd highest increase for a day in the history of the market

I don't panic yet and honestly maybe this is all bullshit and Monday futures are going to be green and crisis averted..again

Trend Analysis is voodoo. Or rather, it will always be behind the times and no longer working well unless you are actually using the latest, most sophisticated models at the best quant firms.

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Gah! I bought a little more SPCE on Thursday and decided to sell half of my Thursday purchase on Friday for a quick gain when it rose to $49. But I forgot to choose the tax lots manually so it used FIFO and sold my low cost basis stock from August! That stock was only 6 months away from a full year and a much lower tax rate. If I end up selling my SPCE position between August 1 this year and Jan 29 next year this is probably going to cost me $200 in more taxes for not remembering to change the tax allocation.

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Also, Nanis, to be clear, fraud is illegal. Lying about a stock or company is illegal. Telling the truth or expressing opinions is generally not illegal.

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Responding to the interesting discussion on position sizing from last topic:

Now that I have six figures, the game plan was always to get a lot more conservative from here, I think I will still likely be investing a good portion of the money in my Ameritrade account at all times, I'm just going to diversify a lot more, do more brief swing trades with 10k or 20k invested. Don't think I'm willing to ever do a position size more than half of my portfolio anymore, no matter how high my conviction on a trade might be.

That sounds very reasonable and I'm happy to hear that. I think it is good - you have more money at risk now, money that is harder to make back if it is lost. Half is probably the most I'll put on any one position also, and only with very high conviction ideas. A regular strong conviction idea I'll probably do no more than 1/3. My average play gets allocated a little less than 10%.

To me between $1000 and $5000 sounds reasonable
Anything more than that in a high volatility stock like AMC or GME or other meme stocks is crazy

On 175k, 5k is less than 3%. Which is fine for a high variance stock in a diversified portfolio. 1k seems low. At that point, the amount of work you would need to do to fill your portfolio with investments is probably too much. Like, if you have 5-10 stocks, it's relatively easy to keep up with news and ideas about them so that you are investing intelligently. If you have 40 stocks it's like a full time job and if you have 100 stocks I don't know how one person would have enough time to do it. You might as well buy a fund at that point.

Although, from previous conversations I think you keep most of it in cash, right? In which case I guess the allocation discussion would go differently. I mean, on the one hand I think it's silly to keep a huge cash hoard like that; on the other hand, if you can't handle the emotional rollercoaster of investing it's probably better not to do it.

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Nanis23 posted...

So why do you believe this never happened before? no one dared to rally a stock in public. No one

It happens all the time, constantly. CNBC is literally doing it 24 hours a day every day. Citron Research is doing it over and over on Twitter. There is nothing new about people talking about investments. What is possibly unprecedented is this 100%+ short interest in Gamestop.

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Also, your example is exactly why people buy Tesla stock LOL. "I love their cars." Of course someone can tell others to buy Wendy's because their food is delicious. Delicious food => customers => profits.

What a streamer can't do is imply they have inside information. Like, he can't stream and say "everyone should buy Wendy's because I know something about the company." All the information on WSB is public though.

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Collusion could be illegal I think. Sharing your thoughts about an investment idea is legal. And people tell others to buy and hold stocks all the time.

And no, the SEC hasn't tried to take WSB down, probably because they know they can't do that. Free speech is highly protected in the US and prior restraint of speech before it is published is treated with the highest standards. Attempting to silence discussion is itself obvious market manipulation. If after this is all over, they find evidence of collusion, they can look at it then but, like, the reality is, people are acting independently here.

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Nanis23 posted...

So in retrospect, Robinhood etc are the good guys?

LOL No. There would be no such crash if these guys had any sense of risk management.

Actually, I have a theory for why they don't. We, as a country, encouraged this when we bailed them out in 2008. Now they expect to be bailed out if they lose, as long as they lose a lot. That must not happen again. No bailouts! The market will recover on its own because nothing's really changed and everyone else will get a chance to buy in at temporarily lower prices.

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As for the AMC short squeeze, GME has a market cap about 5 times as big and hasn't triggered the squeeze yet so I'd guess AMC has a long way to go before really getting into that area. On the other hand, it appears that the funds generally use portfolio margin where their margin calls are calculated not per stock but based on their entire portfolio....meaning they don't get a margin call until their entire portfolio is at risk of wipeout. Which means everything is connected - any stock they are short going up pushes them closer to their limit, any stock they are long going down also helps. And this month it would appear that's just about every stock they are short has gone up and every stock they are long has gone down.

https://twitter.com/ihors3

This is the best source I've found for good information about short interest (including explanations of what over 100% short interest really means). I would say there is a lot of risk for longs but much much more for shorts.

There's also risk across the market in stocks these funds are long as they sell those - in retrospect I am disappointed in myself for not having sold a lot of my stocks in companies that are not heavily shorted on Thursday. I was pretty sure that the market was going to fall a lot on Friday after having seen this play out Wednesday. I talked myself out of selling on the theory that it would have to fall by a fairly substantial amount to be worth it since it would lock in a short term capital gain and I can get it into long term capital gain area by waiting a few more months. Also thought that I have protection because if there is a market crash from this, GME will moon.

But, if the great short squeeze does happen, the market probably falls off a lot more. If it gets to the point where there are major bankruptcies and brokers start having liability, there is a chance of a cascading collapse like that one day -22% move in 1987. Would be an interesting day to see GME/AMC/BBBY/etc +600% and the rest of the market in circuit breaker red territory. My hope is, the financial system has been using the past 2 days to limit their exposure to avoid this kind of thing. It would not be good for the country.


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CoolCly posted...

That doesn't apply too much to the *true visionaries* who got in at super low prices, but most of us that bought above $8 or even closer to $20 need to be very careful. If you bought Gamestop in the $30-100 range you should be a bit cautious, if you bought in the $80-250 range you should be very careful, if you bought above $250 you need to be real fuckin careful because you could end up in real bad shape.

Everyone should be careful, unless you've already cashed out a lot. If you are a true visionary and haven't cashed out yet you probably have quite a lot of money at stake in which case you should be even more careful I think. Sure, if it crashes to $20 you still have a big profit....but you forewent a much bigger one.

What I'm looking for more than price is volume. Volume paired with a downward movement would be the telltale sign of long stockholders capitulating. If you look at the chart for the last week, it hasn't happened once yet. High volume has been correlated with rises, and low volume with declines.

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StartTheMachine posted...

https://www.marketbeat.com/stocks/NYSE/AMC/short-interest/

Okay so this information is public, and the days to cover is 0.6. It's right there. That image I posted is at least partially correct, no? How would this not rocket the stock?

E: Scroll down a bit to see all their short positions and the days to cover. Seems like 2 days from now is when the biggest percentage of short positions are forced to cover (I assume this means 2 trading days and the weekend doesn't count?). So so so many shares, that rocket could be nuts.

Days to cover doesn't mean that. It means given the average trading volume per day, it would take 0.6 days for all the shorts to cover. That's actually quite a low number for it, which doesn't inspire a lot of confidence for the squeeze.

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StartTheMachine posted...

The squeeze starts mid Monday, but could last all week. Here, this explains it in very basic terms for new investors.



I would personally buy as early as you can Monday. Will probably rally hard pre-market. Most brokers allow people to buy pre-market, and often times new investors don't realize that. Just put the expiration on your buy order at +EXT instead of Day. Ameritrade allows you to buy as early as 7 a.m., but it's different for different platforms.

I'm confused about this. Short shares don't expire. Do they mean short calls?

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Also, obviously, it's better to suspend trading entirely than to only let one side trade. I was upset when they did that with LK back in April last year but when it was unhalted the prices were fair. Much better outcome than having retail investors sell into an environment where they are getting paid way below a fair price for their shares because there is artificially no demand. And sure, you could say that people could just not sell until the trading situation is fixed - but there are going to be people, usually the least sophisticated shareholders, who don't know to do that and panic sell.

But! Here it could not be suspended entirely because why should NYSE and all the brokers/market makers with their act together have to stop trading a stock because Apex and Robinhood can't meet capital requirements? And that's where the need for better regulation is - to make sure they will smoothly meet capital requirements next time.

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100 shares of GME is $32,500 though. That's the amount of shares you get for exercising one call option and so it's the minimum you can buy that way.

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LordoftheMorons posted...

What are you saying shouldn't be allowed here?

You realistically need intermediaries to facilitate trades; without them, I couldn't just say "hey, I want to buy a stock of GME at the current price" and have that happen; there's likely going to be a mismatch between the number of people buying and selling. So what actually happens is that I buy from/sell to a market maker and they figure out the other end of things. But if everyone wants to buy rather than sell because this thing is blowing up like crazy, the market maker's gonna be forced to short the stock themselves and take on a ton of risk unless they stop letting people buy (I guess Robinhood is not a market maker themselves, but they execute trades on behalf of the market makers). Then if they take on so much risk that they literally can't cover it and things fall through, everything's fucked.

It is true that allowing selling but not buying manipulates the market and I can see an argument that if they shut down one they should shut down the other, but my suspicion is that people would also have been mad about that (probably madder?)

LOTM, sorry, but you have no idea what you're talking about. It is not a market maker's job to set a price and eat liability if he can't find counterparties at that price. If there is a mismatch of buyers and sellers at a price point then then price has to move! If everyone wants to buy at $300 then the price should go up. There is a price at which there will be more long shares available to sell. A higher price. How much higher, I don't know, possibly very much higher in this case. At that price possibly some people who have made poor financial decisions will be going bankrupt.

What does that mean? They've already taken on too much risk - Robinhood or Apex or someone. They have not protected themselves for this situation which people on WSB have been publicly predicting would happen for months. They have failed as brokers or market makers (not really sure where the failure is). And the SEC or NYSE or someone should be regulating them to make sure they maintain appropriate risk management.

Something that this squeeze has made clear is that a bunch of supposedly smart people on Wall Street have no sense of risk management. Collectively, they have lost 20 billion dollars shorting a company that was worth 200 million or so at the bottom.

So yes, there are people who are taking risks they shouldn't, but it's not people investing a small amount of money they can easily afford and which they actually have on buying GME long stock. It's the short sellers who are risking an astronomical amount of money for a comparatively tiny possible gain. And that wouldn't be so bad systemically, but the problem is they are risking more than they have. And if they can't cover it, then others must cover for them, and the chain reaction of chaos starts.

But from a regulator's point of view - if a broker or market maker or anyone has to cheat or else they go bankrupt - they must go bankrupt and they must not be allowed to cheat. No more bailouts.


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This topic was a lot poorer when we started 10ish months ago. This is a sort of perfect storm of a very high savings rate due to there being less to spend money on with the pandemic and possibly the strongest bull market in history.

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Now Blur is aggressive. That's how he's done 10x in 7 months. I don't have the stomach for the size of a lot of his plays.

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Nanis23 posted...

I mean I have something like $170k total, all accounts combined

I would never buy 25k worth of AMC stocks. Losing $2.5k in 5 minutes would kill me mentally

You're conservative. That bet is reasonable.

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$328 close. Okay, that's not terrible. Would have liked to have hit an all time closing high. Would also really like to retest that intraday high at $483. The important thing is that volume remains low. 10 million shares lower than yesterday and that's with retail able to buy again.

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Yeah, Robinhood is a broker, not a website. They can't just make their own rules.

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Also, I kinda think a lot of people will be doing a lot of business with GME and AMC in the future. Like, if I'm shopping for a game in the future, I will be doing it at Gamestop.

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Nanis23 posted...

I love how in the US you can just change broker like flipping a light switch

It's not like that. If we didn't get so many prominent people talking about it yesterday, and the SEC talking about it today, I don't know that their ploy wouldn't have worked.

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And I see these buy restrictions as almost a confession on the part of the powers that be that they know their position is untenable. If people can't buy stocks on Robinhood, they can switch to a broker where they can.

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I already sold most of my shares for a nice profit on Tuesday/Wednesday so I'm holding my last batch of GME until/unless we see considerably higher prices or maybe if it appears that the shorts have escaped. Don't think they're making much progress with that on this volume though (even lower than yesterday, when all those brokerages weren't allowing retail to buy).

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We seems to be moving now. I bought more SPCE yesterday when it dropped due to all the high short interest stocks dropping. Sold off half of what I bought yesterday because SPCE is getting to be a high enough portion of my portfolio that I feel tense, although it is my highest faith play.

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Lopen posted...

To get around robinhood limiting my shares I'm buying $1 calls and exercising them.

Now the gimmick and how they save the shorts here is you can't actually exercise a call the same day you buy it which is bunk

What? So what happen to calls expiring today?

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Premarket trading is open in the US and GME is at $450.

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CoolCly posted...

Well, logic I see supporting this is how the clearing house acts as a middleman and is the one that actually buys the shares from other brokers

If I, Cly, want to buy 10 shares for $100 from red sox, I don't send the money to red sox, and red sox doesn't send the shares to me. I have a broker, Questrade, and red sox has a broker, Ameritrade. But Questrade don't interact directly either! There's a clearing house in the middle; ClearHouse. ClearHouse gives $100 to Ameritrade, and Ameritrade will give the 10 shares to ClearHouse. Questrade will give $100 to ClearHouse and ClearHouse will give 10 shares to Questrade. But this process doesn't happen instantly like it appears to us, Clearhouse is essentially buying the share from Ameritrade, and selling the share to Questrade, and it takes a couple days to actually happen.

So, does Questrade give the money before ClearHouse buys it from Ameritrade? I don't think necessarily. They have collateral from Questrade to justify buying the share from Ameritrade. If Questrade doesn't end up giving the $100, ClearHouse doesn't give them the share and doesn't completely lose out. Let's say they have $1000 collateral on hand, so they are okay doing this trade for Questrade.

But what if Questrade suddenly wants ClearHouse to buy $10,000 in shares from Ameritrade. Should ClearHouse give Ameritrade $10k when it's not sure Questrade will pay, and doesn't have the collateral to seize if Questrade doesn't come through? ESPECIALLY when the share price might tank immediately after and Clearhouse loses out?

What would the ClearHouse do? They'd tell Questrade they aren't going to fulfill these highly volatile stock trades unless Questrade can provide collateral.

So in this case, the clearing house wasn't willing to buy GME for Robin Hood or a few other brokers due to the level of collateral on hand. In this case, it wouldn't be RobinHood or Webull who disabled buying, but the clearing house.

That's the argument here - whether it's actually true though, i have no idea. I've never heard of a stock being limited on only buying before.

Yes, that's very similar to my theory from earlier in the day. Except that there is no way that small retail investors buying long stock is generating liquidity issues. The problem is short sellers who have put up insufficient margin to withstand a squeeze. So, example:

I deposit $100 with Ameritrade. At 50% margin, that allows me to short $200 of stock. So I short 1 share of ABC which is trading at $200. Let's say the margin maintenance requirement is 30%. That means if the position moves against me so that it exceeds $100 + $100 / (1 - 0.3) = approx. $242, I get a margin call and my broker will close my position. Normally, I've lost $42 out of $100 and my broker has lost nothing.

But now say this isn't a normal stock, but is in a short squeeze. When the stock hits $242, my broker attempts to close it by placing a buy order. But there are already no shares left for sale at $242. The best my broker can do is to buy for $400. Well, there's a total loss of $200 on this trade and I only put up $100. So my broker now eats a loss of $100. My broker is not in the business of shorting stocks so this loss is unacceptable and crushing.

So here's where it goes from a hypothetical to speculative: what if the broker/clearinghouse knows they have massive liability in a short squeeze because they don't believe their short sellers can deliver the funds? They also believe that changing margin requirements now, to something that would protect against a short squeeze like a 1000% margin requirement would immediately place their shorts into a margin call and trigger the squeeze before they've put up any more margin (which they aren't able to do that extent anyway). So they manipulate the market to try to force the price down to stop it from happening. And then tell us that they couldn't afford to do anything else.

I don't know if that is what is happening but there needs to be an investigation.

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I'm not sure how clearinghouses work, but his explanation did not make any sense to me. Why was it getting too expensive for the clearinghouse to settle trades? Stocks go up and down all the time, and I've never heard of that. Also, why does it matter if someone is opening or closing a position? In both cases, the broker is either buying a stock. Whether it gets allocated to a customer opening a new long position or closing a short position should be done at the brokerage; shouldn't have anything to do with the clearinghouse.

Also, volatility today after they did this was the highest it's ever been. So if that was supposed to reduce volatility, lol no.

Finally, if this is the explanation, why are they allowing trading tomorrow? Volatility hasn't gone down. If they truly can't afford it then they still can't afford it for tomorrow right? What's changed in a day other than political pressure and AGs talking about investigations?

Robinhood is limiting buying of GME tomorrow to 5 shares per customer (and that's only if you owned no shares to start with, otherwise you can buy only up to a max of 5). That is frankly ridiculous - what's the difference between 10 million people buying 5 shares and 1 million people buying 50 shares?

I will say, if they are trying to suppress the price this could backfire on them. If you tell people that they can only buy 5 shares of a stock, they are going to infer that this stock must be incredibly valuable. In the old days Wall Street didn't even like dealing in lots of less than 100 shares and now 5 is the maximum you can buy?

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I wonder how many investors are pulling their money from long/short funds. If I had invested in one and did not get firm assurances that they did not have short exposure to GME, AMC, and others I would be trying to get my money out ASAP.

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StartTheMachine posted...

We also have people of different political affiliations, like red sox and Chris, just like we have AOC all the way to Ted Cruz fighting against the brokers clearly manipulating the market to do the bidding of hedge funds

Unity in America. You love to see it

Chris and I actually agree on a lot of things in politics. Much more than we disagree on, I think.

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And if LOTM is a hedge fund manager who just buys index funds while going on perma-vacation - he would be a much much much better fund manager than the people who run these long/short funds who gambled their clients' billions of dollars on betting against America.

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And we are back over $300 on GME in after hours.

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CoolCly posted...

Well, I think the short interest is still there - but I'm starting to wonder if settling it will actually have the impact we thought it will if that level of volume is already normally happening?

There's no reason to think they have to settle all the short interest at the same time, right? If they had to settle they theoretically could have done it already, so when they actually do it, why would it push the price that much

If I'm thinking along the right track then the $200-400 range is where we will peak, but maybe I'm missing something

They have to close the position if they get margin called. That happens if the total value of their portfolio falls below some level. Their broker will force them to close the positions as a further move in price against them will bankrupt them leaving the broker with liability to pay the difference.

According to Chamath, hedge funds have already been doing this, but by selling their long positions rather than closing shorts (because they are afraid buying the short stocks will send the prices soaring even faster). His data is that amount of position closing done by long/short funds is already nearly at the level of March 2020, when the whole market crashed and then zoomed up. But the belief is that the actual closing so far has been mostly in the long positions. That was probably the reason the market in general fell yesterday a lot yesterday as GME and AMC soared.

https://twitter.com/chamath/status/1354883155279237123

The reason it surges skyward is that when it gets bad, shorts will have to compete to get out first. If you are out early, you don't lose as much. The more you wait, the worse it gets. So once a short fund decides there's no way out, that the squeeze will happen, then it's in their interest to be the first to start covering. So there's a mad rush for the exits, like a crowded theater on fire.

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September 1, 2003; November 4, 2007; September 2, 2013
Congratulations to DP Oblivion in the Guru Contest!

Maybe LOTM is a hedge fund manager who just buys index funds and spends his days posting about politics.

This morning's attack (I don't think it can be called anything else) almost certainly did cost some people their money, who panic sold GME at $126 or AMC at $7. I read about someone new to the market who bought AMC at $16 yesterday and panicked when it shot down to $7 this morning in minutes. The design of the attack was to do this to everyone who owns these stocks. It largely didn't work, because shareholders by and large did not panic and did not sell at the artificially depressed prices.

If this thing does what it could tomorrow and squeezes in earnest, this is going to be the single greatest transfer of wealth from rich to poor in human history.

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September 1, 2003; November 4, 2007; September 2, 2013
Congratulations to DP Oblivion in the Guru Contest!

CoolCly posted...

Do we really believe that almost all of the 170mil shares traded each day for three days and the 90mil yesterday were that scenario though?

It seems to me that there is enough fluidity to move these shares. My assumption is that most of those shares are retailers trading back and forth with eachother (IE buying at $200, selling at $250, $250 guy sells at $350, falls back to $300 and panic sells to new guy) etc. Why would the short sellers settling not fit into this?

Based on the short interest data I've seen, it seems as though short interest has barely moved at all since this started. The data I've seen admittedly is either slow, or incomplete. Iborrowdesk only covers IBKR, but they were showing 0 shares available to borrow all day today, meaning they've all already been borrowed. I think it's fairly safe to say think that the short interest is still in the stratosphere.

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September 1, 2003; November 4, 2007; September 2, 2013
Congratulations to DP Oblivion in the Guru Contest!

Merrill removed the message about not allowing buying GME and AMC.

When this is all over, these brokerages need to be investigated. Specifically, I want to know if they spent today buying GME and AMC call options to hedge their short exposure - buying at prices that were way lower than they would have been but for their not allowing their customers to buy.

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September 1, 2003; November 4, 2007; September 2, 2013
Congratulations to DP Oblivion in the Guru Contest!

As a brokerage firm, we have many financial requirements, including SEC net capital obligations and clearinghouse deposits.

From Robinhood. Net capital obligations? So they do have exposure to GME. They don't say it but it's gotta be short exposure because long exposure can be easily fixed by requiring people to pay in full for the stock up front.

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September 1, 2003; November 4, 2007; September 2, 2013
Congratulations to DP Oblivion in the Guru Contest!

Elon would make a lot of money if he did it.

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September 1, 2003; November 4, 2007; September 2, 2013
Congratulations to DP Oblivion in the Guru Contest!

CoolCly posted...

What does that mean - stock being sold back and forth to eachother? Can this be done for low prices directly to eachother, bypassing the current market prices and preventing the public from taking them? Doesn't make sense to me that they'd be listing the stock they DO have for low prices just to inflate volume... just to have to buy back later at a higher price.

No, it's on the public market. But right now, a lot of retail investors can't buy, and they aren't willing to sell. So it's as if they've turned the public market into their private-ish market. But it doesn't really change anything, because it doesn't change the fact that they've got to buy 140% of the float back, and the owners of those shares are not willing to sell at these prices.

With enough market manipulation, they could theoretically keep the prices low enough to avoid margin calls indefinitely, but the problem is, shareholders also have the right to have their shares returned on demand. So that's not really a feasible way of escape.

My feeling is that unless there's something else big, short sellers and their brokers are going to eat losses in the 100 billion range on GME. That's what they're staring down and why they are so brazenly doing illegal stuff that's brazen enough to get Ted Cruz, Marsha Blackburn, and AOC to agree within hours of them doing it. The alternative is they lose everything - possibly today, maybe tomorrow, very likely very soon.

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September 1, 2003; November 4, 2007; September 2, 2013
Congratulations to DP Oblivion in the Guru Contest!

It's very important that we have members of Congress from both parties, including very prominent ones like AOC and Ted Cruz, as well as billionaires like Elon Musk publicly talking about this.

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September 1, 2003; November 4, 2007; September 2, 2013
Congratulations to DP Oblivion in the Guru Contest!

CoolCly posted...

I was just looking at this independently

doesn't this mean the short interest can be settled easily? the volume is there within the current prices, i don't see why it would need to skyrocket to $1k or anything

I don't think the volume is there. Most of it appears to be short stock being sold back and forth to each other. We had no real reduction in the short interest when we were doing close to 200 million shares per day. Don't think there's much long stock being sold in the 200s. I think the moment significant buying starts, either from new longs or from shorts covering, this thing is going to blow up. I think that's how the hedge funds see it or they wouldn't be moving heaven and earth to try to shake shareholders out of their shares.

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September 1, 2003; November 4, 2007; September 2, 2013
Congratulations to DP Oblivion in the Guru Contest!

I hate to post Twitter posts, but....

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1354890601649610753

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September 1, 2003; November 4, 2007; September 2, 2013
Congratulations to DP Oblivion in the Guru Contest!

Putting here a quote from capitalist Daniel Drew:

He who sells what isn't his'n must buy it back or go to prison.

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September 1, 2003; November 4, 2007; September 2, 2013
Congratulations to DP Oblivion in the Guru Contest!