4 ms·

That's not how this works. Of course the play is bad if you completely ignore that the key part of the play is that short sellers and call contract writers are

That's not how this works. Of course the play is bad if you completely ignore that the key part of the play is that short sellers and call contract writers are contractually obligated to buy pretty much regardless of the price. Whether or not it pans out this way for most retailers is yet to be seen, but the mechanism is sound and the risk is in not having data available to you on what the outstanding short interest is. It's not a loss until you sell, and a key date to sell (tomorrow, when tens of thousands of 1/29 calls expire) hasn't happened yet.

unanswered 6y ago
Once the short positions are covered, shouldn't we expect the price instantly fall to its original level, modulo retail bagholders still buying due to fog of war? And... The price is in freefall in the last minutes of trading today.
- seabird 6y ago
  Largely correct. The only thing I would add is that I wouldn't be surprised at all if it landed a fair bit above where it started, because there being short interest 140% of the float has a pretty chilling effect on people looking at investing. You would see that and either think the shorters are morons in an insanely risky position, or they know something you don't and are _absolutely certain_ that the company is going to implode. This time the former is true, the vast majority of the time, the latter is. Fog of War is the important bit here. The big difference between this and a pump and dump is that the FOW here is retail investors not having great SI data. In theory, a retail investor could still make this work in a "safe" way (safe used very liberally); it would be a hell of a maneuver for everyone with a short position to somehow close their position in a single day before Joe Retailer is able to get any word on what the outstanding SI is. In a pump and dump, your FOW/missing information is when the party working to pump the price decides the gig is up, which is effectively impossible to know unless you are that party. A lot of retail investors with four days of experience under their belt are going to lose their ass by trying to suss out their exit intuitively, but for those that did their homework, this could work. For many, it already has. The argument that this needs to stop because uneducated retail investors can get burned can be reduced to absurdity -- "retail traders can vaporize their life savings by going long on a company facing imminent bankruptcy, so they shouldn't be allowed to trade with even the most rudimentary of instruments." Price being in freefall doesn't affect the huge number of people that were in well under that, the way this strategy is working, or that people somehow still think that going short on this is anything other than a lottery ticket play because of "muh fundamentals."

unanswered 6y ago

Once the short positions are covered, shouldn't we expect the price instantly fall to its original level, modulo retail bagholders still buying due to fog of war? And... The price is in freefall in the last minutes of trading today.

seabird 6y ago
Largely correct. The only thing I would add is that I wouldn't be surprised at all if it landed a fair bit above where it started, because there being short interest 140% of the float has a pretty chilling effect on people looking at investing. You would see that and either think the shorters are morons in an insanely risky position, or they know something you don't and are _absolutely certain_ that the company is going to implode. This time the former is true, the vast majority of the time, the latter is. Fog of War is the important bit here. The big difference between this and a pump and dump is that the FOW here is retail investors not having great SI data. In theory, a retail investor could still make this work in a "safe" way (safe used very liberally); it would be a hell of a maneuver for everyone with a short position to somehow close their position in a single day before Joe Retailer is able to get any word on what the outstanding SI is. In a pump and dump, your FOW/missing information is when the party working to pump the price decides the gig is up, which is effectively impossible to know unless you are that party. A lot of retail investors with four days of experience under their belt are going to lose their ass by trying to suss out their exit intuitively, but for those that did their homework, this could work. For many, it already has. The argument that this needs to stop because uneducated retail investors can get burned can be reduced to absurdity -- "retail traders can vaporize their life savings by going long on a company facing imminent bankruptcy, so they shouldn't be allowed to trade with even the most rudimentary of instruments." Price being in freefall doesn't affect the huge number of people that were in well under that, the way this strategy is working, or that people somehow still think that going short on this is anything other than a lottery ticket play because of "muh fundamentals."