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Look at the math, the stock is shorted over 100%. Around 120% last time I checked. Who has 120% of stocks to sell back to billionaire short sellers? The billi

Look at the math, the stock is shorted over 100%. Around 120% last time I checked. Who has 120% of stocks to sell back to billionaire short sellers? The billionaire vulture short sellers created this mess. Now, they are the one's that have to pay the price.

adamjb 6y ago
Shares can be traded multiple times
majormajor 6y ago
The outstanding share volume is 69.75M shares and the daily volume over the last 3 days is 108.66M shares traded a day... so, the answer is "a bunch of the current holders," at these prices. Why would they have to be distinct shares - which obviously can't exist at that percent - vs just a subset of shares being traded a lot - which is already happening EVERY DAY? https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GME/key-statistics/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GME/key-statistics/ (That daily volume also shows that if you think you're part of some group that's just buying and holding and reducing the volume of available shares... you might want to check again! Clearly there's a LOT of active selling going on.)
- vinceguidry 6y ago
  What we're not really seeing here is who is holding and selling their shares, and to who. Assuredly once the shorters get a hold of a share of stock, they're not gonna let it go because they need it to cover their position. So what they do instead is to sell the stock to each other at super-low volumes in order to try to drive the price down, using their brokerage advantages to make it so the shares don't reach the open market. This is a ladder attack and it's responsible for every last one of the dips on the market. They wait until late in the day when people aren't really paying attention. They can sell to each other but that doesn't mean there's a lot of float. Don't let that fool you, there isn't. It's not in the interest of the shorters to buy up all the shares that come on the market. That's effectively covering their position. It'll drive up the price massively. They want to get lots of people scared into selling so there's lots of float. Then they can manipulate the price down using media shills or whatever and then snap them all up at a bargain rate and use them to cover their positions. If it's not cheap then any collective buying will drive the price up tremendously, what's called the infinity squeeze. You need a DISTINCT share in order to cover your position. One you own. That's the contract. They have to deliver it to the market maker which they took up the short position with. The market maker will then put that share back on the open market. If you want to deliver another stock, you need to buy it back from the market maker, at full market value, and deliver it back to the market maker. You can't just conjure up a share in order to cover with. High trade volume !== high float. It has to be an actual, honest-to-God share. If not you just defaulted to someone with way bigger pockets than you have. There just aren't a lot of shares available. Volume can be incredibly high, as it was over the last few days, but that doesn't mean there's a lot of float. The vast majority of shares are in the hands of people with no interest in floating them. The trade volume that's happening right now is the same shares changing hands with people who are just now discovering the action. The shorters will do anything to liquidate the massive amount of shares being held by the degenerates, but they took their stock certificates and buried them in the desert.
  - jcranmer 6y ago
    Matt Levine's article today [1] has a table of the retail flows, according to the underlying broker that handles most of them. To summarize: between Monday and Thursday, retail investors bought 74,385,426 shares of GME and sold 75,105,358 shares (or slightly more than they bought). That really runs counter to the theory that retail investors are holding all the shares while the shorters are scrambling to find them. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-29/reddit-traders-on-robinhood-are-on-both-sides-of-gamestop https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-29/reddit...
    - vinceguidry 6y ago
      So 1 million new shares hit the market over four days from retail traders. That allowed the short interest to drop from 140ish to 120ish. They call those "paper hands" on u/WallStreetBets. Still an otherworldly amount of short positions coming due, and an awful lot of degenerates with diamond hands.
      - majormajor 6y ago
        Without more sequencing info, that's just speculation, no? We don't know: * how many new short positions were opened * how many old ones were closed * what happened next to the shares involved in those transactions where retail investors moved 75M shares * where the shares came from in the trades where retail investors bought 74M shares That's why Levine discusses many possible stories behind those numbers. The only real thing that many retail sales really does is contradict the "we're all HOLDING!!" story. It could be that very little of that was closing the original Melvin positions... but we don't have evidence, do we? How can you prove that retail didn't sell 75M to people closing short positions, and then retail bought 74M back from the brokers those shares were returned to, while meanwhile, a bunch of new investors went short because 300 bucks is a bonkers price and they're betting they can wait it out a few months? Or anywhere in between?
        vinceguidry 6y ago
        Think about how this would have played out without the degenerates. Millions of shares floating, disinformation campaigns find their fruit in people who don't do their research. Shorters can cover their shares a few thousand at a time, cause the price to rise a bit, then do a touch of market manip to bring it right back down. Rinse and repeat over a few weeks and the positions are clear. It's expensive because there's lots of interest but the amount of float is allowing massive under-the-radar moves. Very soon people lose interest because there won't be much in the way of massive gains anymore The fact that the price keeps picking back up after every single dip means only one thing. There's still massive pressure going on. If this market were rational, it would clear. It's not clearing. No way GME is worth $360. If it weren't for the HODLers, the only thing that would drive the price back up would be news stories piquing interest. That's not what we're seeing here. It's picking right back up because the people the shorters wanted to sell, didn't.
vkou 6y ago
The same share of stock can be shorted multiple times, as it gets traded from person to person, letting you hit any arbitrary number of shorted shares. The reason it's so heavily shorted is because institutional investors believe that GME is an overvalued piece of shit. I don't know if it was overvalued last week, but I'm 100% confident that it is indeed overvalued this week. I've been sorely tempted to short it myself... But I don't pick stocks, or play with options.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  Before anyone gets the bright idea to short it, they should bear in mind the tremendous interest rate on share loans (over 30% last I checked), and also the fact that someone with real money might try to pick up the short squeeze.

adamjb 6y ago

Shares can be traded multiple times

majormajor 6y ago

The outstanding share volume is 69.75M shares and the daily volume over the last 3 days is 108.66M shares traded a day... so, the answer is "a bunch of the current holders," at these prices. Why would they have to be distinct shares - which obviously can't exist at that percent - vs just a subset of shares being traded a lot - which is already happening EVERY DAY? https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GME/key-statistics/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GME/key-statistics/ (That daily volume also shows that if you think you're part of some group that's just buying and holding and reducing the volume of available shares... you might want to check again! Clearly there's a LOT of active selling going on.)

vinceguidry 6y ago
What we're not really seeing here is who is holding and selling their shares, and to who. Assuredly once the shorters get a hold of a share of stock, they're not gonna let it go because they need it to cover their position. So what they do instead is to sell the stock to each other at super-low volumes in order to try to drive the price down, using their brokerage advantages to make it so the shares don't reach the open market. This is a ladder attack and it's responsible for every last one of the dips on the market. They wait until late in the day when people aren't really paying attention. They can sell to each other but that doesn't mean there's a lot of float. Don't let that fool you, there isn't. It's not in the interest of the shorters to buy up all the shares that come on the market. That's effectively covering their position. It'll drive up the price massively. They want to get lots of people scared into selling so there's lots of float. Then they can manipulate the price down using media shills or whatever and then snap them all up at a bargain rate and use them to cover their positions. If it's not cheap then any collective buying will drive the price up tremendously, what's called the infinity squeeze. You need a DISTINCT share in order to cover your position. One you own. That's the contract. They have to deliver it to the market maker which they took up the short position with. The market maker will then put that share back on the open market. If you want to deliver another stock, you need to buy it back from the market maker, at full market value, and deliver it back to the market maker. You can't just conjure up a share in order to cover with. High trade volume !== high float. It has to be an actual, honest-to-God share. If not you just defaulted to someone with way bigger pockets than you have. There just aren't a lot of shares available. Volume can be incredibly high, as it was over the last few days, but that doesn't mean there's a lot of float. The vast majority of shares are in the hands of people with no interest in floating them. The trade volume that's happening right now is the same shares changing hands with people who are just now discovering the action. The shorters will do anything to liquidate the massive amount of shares being held by the degenerates, but they took their stock certificates and buried them in the desert.
- jcranmer 6y ago
  Matt Levine's article today [1] has a table of the retail flows, according to the underlying broker that handles most of them. To summarize: between Monday and Thursday, retail investors bought 74,385,426 shares of GME and sold 75,105,358 shares (or slightly more than they bought). That really runs counter to the theory that retail investors are holding all the shares while the shorters are scrambling to find them. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-29/reddit-traders-on-robinhood-are-on-both-sides-of-gamestop https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-29/reddit...
  - vinceguidry 6y ago
    So 1 million new shares hit the market over four days from retail traders. That allowed the short interest to drop from 140ish to 120ish. They call those "paper hands" on u/WallStreetBets. Still an otherworldly amount of short positions coming due, and an awful lot of degenerates with diamond hands.
    - majormajor 6y ago
      Without more sequencing info, that's just speculation, no? We don't know: * how many new short positions were opened * how many old ones were closed * what happened next to the shares involved in those transactions where retail investors moved 75M shares * where the shares came from in the trades where retail investors bought 74M shares That's why Levine discusses many possible stories behind those numbers. The only real thing that many retail sales really does is contradict the "we're all HOLDING!!" story. It could be that very little of that was closing the original Melvin positions... but we don't have evidence, do we? How can you prove that retail didn't sell 75M to people closing short positions, and then retail bought 74M back from the brokers those shares were returned to, while meanwhile, a bunch of new investors went short because 300 bucks is a bonkers price and they're betting they can wait it out a few months? Or anywhere in between?
      - vinceguidry 6y ago
        Think about how this would have played out without the degenerates. Millions of shares floating, disinformation campaigns find their fruit in people who don't do their research. Shorters can cover their shares a few thousand at a time, cause the price to rise a bit, then do a touch of market manip to bring it right back down. Rinse and repeat over a few weeks and the positions are clear. It's expensive because there's lots of interest but the amount of float is allowing massive under-the-radar moves. Very soon people lose interest because there won't be much in the way of massive gains anymore The fact that the price keeps picking back up after every single dip means only one thing. There's still massive pressure going on. If this market were rational, it would clear. It's not clearing. No way GME is worth $360. If it weren't for the HODLers, the only thing that would drive the price back up would be news stories piquing interest. That's not what we're seeing here. It's picking right back up because the people the shorters wanted to sell, didn't.

vkou 6y ago

The same share of stock can be shorted multiple times, as it gets traded from person to person, letting you hit any arbitrary number of shorted shares. The reason it's so heavily shorted is because institutional investors believe that GME is an overvalued piece of shit. I don't know if it was overvalued last week, but I'm 100% confident that it is indeed overvalued this week. I've been sorely tempted to short it myself... But I don't pick stocks, or play with options.

whatshisface 6y ago
Before anyone gets the bright idea to short it, they should bear in mind the tremendous interest rate on share loans (over 30% last I checked), and also the fact that someone with real money might try to pick up the short squeeze.