Jumped on the $GME bandwagon on Friday, 4 @ ~316. My 36 hours of day trading has already taught me that no matter how this plays out, I will never YOLO on a bubble ever again.
The principle seemed straightforward: hedge funds got lazy/greedy, over-shorted their positions, bet against a company that wasn't actually going under, and some astute monkies on reddit caught them and triggered a short squeeze. Even as someone who knows almost nothing about the stock market, the basic premise makes sense. But the devil's in the details, and hype is blinding.
First red flag was when I realized DeepFuckingValue did not bet on the short squeeze, he bet on undervalued stock price over a year ago. He has also trimmed his position such that no matter what happens in the squeeze, he walks away with 8 figures. So the people screaming "if he's still in, I'm still in!" and "look at those brass balls, if he can lose $5MM in a day then I can hold" are really living up to the dumb ape meme. He didn't lose $5MM yesterday, he lost $5MM in *unrealized gains*, there is a *huge* difference.
Second red flag was a common sense idea that hedge funds won't go down without a fight, and they have literally billions of dollars and decades of experience. You don't get that without learning how to game the system in complex, subtle ways. So even if they are still heavily shorted (which they might not even be anymore), and even if somehow WSB is holding some kind of meaningful leverage over them, that doesn't rule out the very real possibility they have a dozen ways out of this that people like me have no idea about.
But even in the off chance that somehow this turns around, and $GME does go "to the moon," that doesn't change the fact that it's bad long-term strategy to bet on bubbles and jump on bandwagons. They almost certainly fail, and if they don't, they only serve to inflate egos that will fall even harder on the next gamble. I'm still holding my shares but I don't expect to see my ~$1200 ever again. In the off chance I break even or see a profit here, I will count it as dumb luck and use it as seed money to learn how to invest in real long term gains.
Edit: holy shit RIP my inbox. No way I can read all that.
Want to clarify a few things. Not financial advice.
My position: I knew I was late to the party. I wanted to gamble. I knew what I was doing, and (mostly) why I did it. Hindsight showed me it was more based on emotion than I wanted to admit, but still, I'm not surprised by the outcome so far, and I'm totally OK with taking the L and calling it a lesson learned. I don't blame DFV, WSB, or anyone for my choices. I own them, even proudly, because I wanted to step out and take a calculated risk vs. sit on the sidelines out of fear of loss. I'm holding because I already bought my tickets to this ride, want to see this thing play out, and I'm fine with gambling the final $300 on the outside chance things turn around.
Your positions: brothers, sisters, nonbinary siblings: you are not your portfolio. whether up or down, your value is not based on how big or small an imaginary number is. you are a human being on the bleeding edge of 3.5 BILLION years of evolution, you have more actual success in your past and potential success in your future than you'll ever know. 12 years ago I was a penniless alcoholic literally stealing change from my grandpa to get loaded on 211 Steel Reserve. I hit my bottom, joined AA, and now I'm a network engineer, wife, kids, the whole lot. Anything is possible if you don't give up on yourself. But I know it's not that easy, we all need borrowed self-esteem before we can see the real value inside. So if this $GME gamble hit you hard, please reach out to someone. don't give up. Hell, this bubble isn't even over, it might even turn around! But either way, don't give up.
Edit2:
wow, never expected this to go this far. wrote it on my way out the door as a way to cope with the situation. read a ton of replies, probably missed most of them. thanks for all the love and hate and everything inbetween! A few more points:

• Agreed that RH deserves to be held accountable. No question they manipulated this.
• Agreed it's not over yet. the squeeze could happen. but if it does, my main personal takeaway from this experience will stand: I won't speculate on bubbles anymore. This is my position if I lose everything or make $100k.
• if you posted gains, that's awesome! so glad for you, I wish you the best!

Edit3 2/3/21:
Full disclosure, I closed my position this morning at a ~$900 realized loss.
My gut says the squeeze happened, short interest isn't what I thought it was on Friday, and the stock will return to actual value soon.

EDIT: Added a warning because people in the comments seem to think I’m trying to manipulate people
WARNING: THIS IS AN EXTREMELY RISKY PLAY: THERE ARE NO METRICS OR CURRENT DATA TO PROVIDE SOLID DD TO HAVE A MORE “CERTAIN” OUTCOME. WHAT YOU ARE TRULY BETTING ON IS OTHER PEOPLE. I WONT TRY TO CONVINCE YOU WHAT TO DO WITH YOUR MONEY. THIS IS MY SPECULATION, MY OPINION AND IT VERY WELL COULD BE WRONG
Hello all,
I wanted to post last night as many of you commenters have asked for however my building lost power and it was absolutely awful. I am currently a refuge and my ladies house and wanted to get this out to the world.
Disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor, but more importantly this is all simply speculation. If anyone wants to make counter claims they are more than welcome but word of advice to all readers. If anyone is claiming that they know exactly what is going to happen...they are lying. There simply isn't enough current data to push this either direction. I am a bull, big time and I would like to explain why.
First let's talk about yesterday
There are a lot of claims of short ladder attacks and the counter-claim is that it was MM's moving the price down. One thing appears certain, there is some sort of manipulation happening in an attempt to drive the price down. Whether this is MM's, HF's, or simply retail shorts and bears; there are a strange number of exchanges happening in a clear effort to lower the price. You can check out the real time quotes here.
Another large thought about why the price should have gone up yesterday was because of the options thats expired Friday 1/29 ITM. The rule is T+2 meaning these individuals have two business days to cover. Well, we expected a surge of these individuals covering and it simply never came. Everyone was glued to the screen Friday ATH waiting to see the spike of covering...but it never happened. Monday again...never happened. Tuesday...oh boy this is their last day they have to cover! Yet...they didn't. So what does this mean? Well, I see two possibilities.

1. They somehow timed it perfectly and covered throughout the dips and spikes
2. They haven't covered yet

I'm in the camp of number 2 hence why I am a bull. If they didn't cover that results in a Failure to Deliver which you can learn about here. So what does this mean for us? Well, that would explain the tremendous price drop as FTD's create "phantom shares" a problem GME is already facing. This will dilute the price tremendously and the amount of FTD's that probably occurred would greatly dilute the price. "With forward contracts, a party with a short position's failure to deliver can cause significant problems for the party with the long position. This difficulty happens because these contracts often involve substantial volumes of assets that are pertinent to the long position's business operations." From the earlier mentioned website regarding FTD's.
Now this is truly fascinating. The 2008 crisis was largely in part due to a mass number of FTD's. In fact, FTD's sometime intentionally happen...just to drive the price down for FUD so they can then cover at a better price.
So if this is correct, what happens next? Well, either you can read about it here. Simply put, the individual has to close out the positions after 13 consecutive settlement days of FTD. So all this logic about T+2 was actually just the logic to begin the FTD countdown, if it hasn't already started at the beginning of this.
Now, I'm not saying "nobody sold" of course people did. But volume is key and the interest in buying outweighed the interest in selling 3-1 Monday and Tuesday. Of course trades are 1-1 but interest was on the buyer side.
Obviously, I don't even need to mention it but restricted trading really is what screwed this thing to begin with. My opinion? It wasn't to prevent a massive short squeeze, it was to buy them time.
Today
So why the hell did it spike this morning? Two reasons.

1. RH still has 100 shares limit on GME, now for those who don't realize, that doesn't mean that is 100 shares per day. No no. The restriction is you can own up to 100 shares of GME. If you already own over 100 shares that's fine, but anyone with less than 100 shares can only add up to that amount. This restriction has not changed and other companies such as Revolut are still imposing a 100% trading restriction on GME. So what did RH offer today? The ability to purchase fractional shares, which doesn't help a whole lot but the fact that buying pressure accelerated at the notion of fractional shares shows that there is still an immense amount of buyers out there.
2. GameStop adds new CTO to the roster, an ex AWS lead engineer. They added other executive positions as well. This further cements the change the company is taking.

Now, before I get into the rest I want to address something: the fundamentals.
There is a disturbing echo chamber around the idea that GameStop is a dying brick and mortar retailer and there is no chance at survival. That is simply not the case. I don't want to do a full GME DD here because this is about the second incoming squeeze. However, let me put it to you this way:
If you were told that a new company was IPO'ing and it was coming to the market with an infrastructure, new talented team, 50 million customers and their plan was to become an e-commerce company to compete with Amazon; their plans for the physical locations was to be game-centric, a place for e-sports to compete, desktop building kiosks, and the newest systems and physical copies of games for those who still love having a physical copy. Not just that, but this company already has revenue share deals with Microsoft and other bigwig companies.
Knowing all that information would you be interested in this company? My answer is an easy yes. The thing with digital transformation and companies changing direction is people get so lost in what the company used to be they can't see what the company is planning on becoming. If this was a brand new company that Ryan Cohen was leading with the same exact model people would be all over the concept.
Enough of that. Let's talking about what is still going on today which is truly fascinating.
So the good news created a large uptick follow by a combination of people escaping with whatever gains they could salvage and some more clear manipulation regardless of the source. But then what? Well, after the bounce down a lot of people saw this as a fantastic buying opportunity which made it recover quickly...but then something interesting started happening. It started uptrending. Slowly. Steadily. Uptrending. Lower lows, higher highs; no sight more beautiful.
My interpretation? We found the bottom of the bears attack. The news has been consistently saying the squeeze is over but one and at time they are saying their might be a second surge and their reasoning is if retailors see this price drop as a buying opportunity instead of red flags, it will surely send the price up. The logic there is simple: if people are buying stock it goes up, if people are selling, it goes down.
So today is pure magic. It doesn't need to be a wild swing up to be promising. What it needs to be is slow, consistent buying pressure even during restricted trading.
But all the shorts covered! Simply not true. That is a fact. All we know is what people are telling us. Melvin says they covered. It will be the third time they have claimed that. Do I think they covered? Yes, I do. Does that matter? No. Now even if Melvin and others covered and the S3 figures are right that means the guess right now is that this stock is still 57% short. Based on their Twitter this isn't including newly opened positions which anyone in their right mind would certainly open a short position when it was 3-400. They thought this bubble would pop and they would make a quick buck. They saw it get down to $85 and started celebrating...but it starting climbing...uh oh.
Truth is, no one will know the real numbers until the 9th. I think it's a little too much tin foil hat to says those numbers will be misconstrued but what we have witnessed over the past few days...it's possible.
So let's talk about who is currently holding GameStop. Well, a shit ton of degenerates that have lost millions of dollars and seemingly don't give a shit. They are here out of principle, truth be told, so am I. I absolutely refuse to give any shares to the shorts after the crap they pulled last week. So we have a ton of bag holders refusing to sell and a ton of people wondering if now is the time to get in for a potential epic second short squeeze. No one is going to sell at these levels. Some people here and there but it simply isn't worth it, not with so much potential for a second squeeze.
So when will this second squeeze happen?
If the newest shorts are smart, it already begun. If I took up a short position and saw this start climbing again after everything it has been through, you better believe I would be covering now while I have profits. Not all of them are going to do this, which is why as the price gradually rises the potential for a larger and larger squeeze is exponential. There is no telling when it will happen. It could be a slow climb for the next couple of weeks before it pops. The 9th will be a huge indicator of what is to come, if that has anywhere above 50% short interest you better believe everyone is going to hop right back into it. It could happen as early as this week. It could be post earnings when Papa Cohen tells us his majestic plans during ER. It could be that ER will actually be fantastic on 03/05 because it will have the console cycle numbers. Look at GME charts in the past, the console cycle always makes the stock pop and with all this attention that very well could be the catalyst.
In summary
I wanted to do deeper analysis for you all but I knew some of you were really looking forward to the next post and my thoughts regarding the situation so I wanted to get something out there. In my opinion, a second surge, a second squeeze is bound to happen. This is a buying opportunity for those who missed the first one and I think the market and stock price is reflecting that sentiment.
Positions:
1100 GME @ $16 closed
500 GME @ $20 closed
50 GME @ $120 open
236 GME @ $250 open
​
TL;DR: I have yet to see any indication or good thesis to explain why the short squeeze would be over. Even if Melvin covered and even if S3 numbers are correct at a 57% short, these are indicators of another squeeze, potentially even more epic. The bleeding days of red on Monday and Tuesday I personally think was a combination of panic selling when premarket and ATH didn't blow up due to the ITM calls and phantom shares being created due to consistent FTD's diluting the share price. I do think these FTD's were intentional and what many are perceiving as a short ladder attack is in fact the creation and purchasing of phantom shares driving the price down. If you are a bagholder, I think it wise to hold, if you have already closed your position I would consider what we are witnessing as another buying opportunity.
Final disclaimer. I have already made a significant sum of money on this GME play. This post is not a hope that you will come rescue me from my bagholding status. The money I put back in was money I was willing to lose and I came back in out of principle to stick it to the man. Good luck everyone and be grateful to be alive during this time, this will go down in financial history quite possibly forever. Retail investors have more power than we think.

Update 2/4 - someone went ahead and spelled out the mechanics of the squeeze quite well and I would like to give their post attention https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/lc8vgo/slv_is_not_going_to_get_squeezedslv_is_the_trojan/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Update 2/2 - I am able to comment again. I messaged several mods on Reddit and the mod account on Twitter. None of them responded but it appears I am able to comment again so I assume one of them lifted my ban
Update 2/1 - I have been banned from posting on WSB. I guess they aren’t yet deleting my post here given the media attention. If this was a rogue mod I’d appreciate being restored the ability to post on WSB. I’m open to talking to any mods
Update 1/31 - there have been tons of 'what to buy' questions so I added a clarity post, hope it helps. It's also getting downvoted to hell because its not about GME so that's discouraging. The speed at which the downvotes flew in makes me think someone made bots to crush new posts related to SLV (or maybe anything not GME). It makes no sense for this post to have 93% upvotes and my new one to have 28%.
I have not sold my GME to buy SLV. I had a small pre-existing position in leaps I bought months ago.
Created an official Twitter handle not sure if I’ll use it, but didn’t want anyone to impersonate me on there
Here is the longer DD for the short squeeze case for SLV, a follow-up from my shorter post a few hours ago. Note that I talk in first person as this is something I’m going to do. Everyone is free to do as they individually please and copy my trade if they’d like to. I think it’s absurd that forces at be think this forum is manipulating by posting publicly but that’s where we are at right now.
First things first, I'm not doing this until the GME rise is done. I am long GME but am going long SLV immediately after.
Update 1/29: due to the manipulation and collusion of citadel, hedge funds, and brokers to change the rules and rig the game in their favor. Who likely knew ahead of time and bought puts right before and calls at the bottom, GME is too important to abandon still. SLV is still my next play but GME needs to go to $1000 and these people need to go to jail.
If you just want to know what to buy skip to the end
I present 2 investment DDs in this post, the short squeeze and the fundamentals. If you want to see what to buy
The short squeeze:
Buy SLV shares and SLV call options to force physical delivery of silver to the SLV vaults. Also buy physical silver bullion. The best possible thing would be to take physical delivery in the futures market if you have access to do so.
The silver futures market has oscillated between having roughly 100-1 and 500-1 ratio of paper traded silver to physical silver, but lets call it 250-1 for now. This means that for every 250 ounces in open interest in the futures market, only 1 actually gets delivered. Most traders would rather settle with cash rather than take delivery of thousands of ounces of silver and have to figure out to store and transport it in the future.
The people naked shorting silver via the futures markets are a couple of large banks and making them pay dearly for their over leveraged naked shorts would be incredible. It's not Melvin capital on the other side of this trade, its JP Morgan. Time to get some payback for the bailouts and manipulation they've done for decades (look up silver manipulation fines that JPM has paid over the years).
The way the squeeze could occur is by forcing a much higher percentage of the futures contracts to actually deliver physical silver. There is very little silver in the COMEX vaults or available to actually be use to deliver, and if they have to start buying en masse on the open market they will drive the price massively higher. There is no way to magically create more physical silver in the world that is ready to be delivered. With a stock you can eventually just issue more shares if the price rises too much, but this simply isn't the case here. The futures market is kind of the wild west of the financial world. Real commodities are being traded, and if you are short, you literally have to deliver thousands of ounces of silver per contract if the holder on the other side demands it. If you remember oil going negative back in May, that was possible because futures are allowed to trade to their true value. They aren't halted and that's what will make this so fun when the true squeeze happens.
Edit for more detail: let’s say there’s one futures seller who gets unlucky and gets the buyer who actually wants to take delivery. He doesn’t have the silver and realizes it’s all of a sudden damn difficult to find some physical silver. He throws up his hands and just goes long a matching number of futures contracts and will demand actual delivery on those. Problem solved because he has now matched the demanding buyer with a new seller. The issue is that the new seller has the same issue and does the exact same thing. This is how the cascade effect of a meltup occurs. All the naked shorts trying to offload their position to someone who actually has some silver. My goal is to ensure that I have the silver and won’t sell to them until silver is at a far higher price due to the desperation.
The silver market is much larger than GME in terms of notional value, but there is very little physical silver actually readily available (think about the difference between total shares and the shares in the active float for a stock), and the paper silver trading hands in the futures market is hundreds of times larger than what is available. Thus when they are forced to actually deliver physical silver it will create a massive short squeeze where an absurd amount of silver will be sought after (to fulfill their contractually obligated delivery) with very little available to actually buy. They are naked shorting silver and will have to cover all at once and the float as a percentage of the total silver stock globally is truly miniscule.
The fundamentals:
The current gold to silver ratio is 73-1. Meaning the price of gold per ounce is 73 times the price of silver. Naturally occurring silver is only 18.75 times as common as gold, so this ratio of 73-1 is quite high. Until the early 20th century, silver prices were pegged at a 15-1 ratio to gold in the US because this ratio was relatively known even then. In terms of current production, the ratio is even lower at 8-1. Meaning the world is only producing 8 ounces of silver for each newly produced ounce of gold.
Global industry has been able to get away with producing so little new silver for so long because governments have dumped silver on the market for 80 years, but now their silver vaults are empty. At the end of WW2 government vaults globally contained 10 billion ounces of silver, but as we moved to fiat currency and away from precious metal backed currencies, the amount held by governments has decreased to only 0.24 billion ounces as they dumped their supply into the market. But this dumping is done now as their remaining supply is basically nil.
This 0.24 billion ounces represents only 8% of the total supply of only 3 billion ounces stored as investment globally. This means that 92% of that gold is held privately by institutions and by millions of boomer gold and silver bugs who have been sitting on meager gains for decades. These boomers aren't going to sell no matter what because they see their silver cache as part of their doomsday prepper supplies. It's locked away in bunkers they built 500 miles from their house. Also, with silver at $23 an ounce currently, this means all of the worlds investment grade silver only has a total market cap of $70 billion. For comparison the investment grade gold in the world is worth roughly $6 trillion. This is because most of the silver produced each year actually gets used, as I have mentioned. $70 billion sounds like a lot, but we don’t have to buy all that much for the price to go up a lot.
**If the squeeze happens, it would be like 40 years worth of their gains in 4 months **
The reason that only 8 ounces of silver are produced for every 1 ounce of gold in today's world is because there aren't really any good naturally occurring silver deposits left in the world. Silver is more common than gold in the earth's crust, but it is spread very thin. Thus nearly every ounce of silver produces is actually a byproduct of mining for other metals such as gold or copper. This means that even as the silver price skyrockets, it wont be easy to increase the supply of silver being produced. Even if new mines were to be constructed, it could take years to come online.
Finally, most of this newly created silver supply each year is used for productive purposes rather than kept for investment. It is used in electronics, solar panels, and jewelry for the most part. This demand wont go away if the silver price rises, so the short sellers will be trying to get their hands on a very small slice of newly minted silver. The solar market is also growing quickly and political pressure to increase solar and electric vehicles could provide more industrial demand.
The other part of the story is the faster moving piece and that is the inflation and currency debasement fear portion. The government and the fed are printing money like crazy debasing the value of the dollar, so investors look for real assets like precious metals to hide out in, driving demand for silver. The $1.9 trillion stimulus passing in a month or two could be a good catalyst. All this money combined with the reopening of the economy could cause some solid inflation to occur, and once inflation starts it often feeds on itself.
​
What to buy:
Edit 2/24: I now advocate buying PSLV for shares, physical metal if the premiums come back down, and if you want options then SLV is still ok for that.
I will be putting 50% directly into SLV shares, and 50% into the $35 strike SLV calls expiring 4/16. This way the SLV purchase creates a groundswell into silver immediately that then rockets through a gamma squeeze as SLV approaches $35. Price target of $75 for SLV by end of April if the short squeeze happens.
Edit: for the part of your purchases going into shares, some people recommend PSLV because they think SLV might start lying about having the silver in their vault. Or that the custodian will be double counting, ie claiming that the same silver belongs to multiple people (banking on the fact that people wont all try to get their silver at once). So if you buy SLV shares and calls, that's great. But I think it could be prudent for us to buy options in SLV (no options on PSLV) and shares in PSLV. It all depends on how paranoid you want to be. There is a lot of paranoia in the precious metals world.
Alternate options:
- buying physical silver; this also works but you pay a premium to buy and sell so its less efficient and you take fewer silver ounces off of the market because of the premium you pay
- going long futures for February or March; if you are a rich bastard and can actually take physical delivery of 1000s of ounces of silver by all means do so. But if you simply settle for cash you are actually part of the problem. We need actual physical delivery, which is what SLV demands and is why SLV is the way to go unless you are going to take delivery
- miners; I don’t recommend buying miners as part of this trade. Miners will absolutely go up if SLV goes up, but buying them doesn't create the squeeze in the actual silver market. Furthermore, most silver miners only derive 30-50% of their revenue from silver anyways, so eventually SLV will outperform them as it gets high enough (and each marginal SLV dollar only increases miner profits by a smaller and smaller percentage)
Details on SLV physical settlement:
When SLV issues shares, the custodian is forced to true up their vaults with the proportional amount of silver daily. From the SLV prospectus:
"An investment in Shares is: Backed by silver held by the Custodian on behalf of the Trust. The Shares are backed by the assets of the Trust. The Trustee’s arrangements with the Custodian contemplate that at the end of each business day there can be in the Trust account maintained by the Custodian no more than 1,100 ounces of silver in an unallocated form. The bulk of the Trust’s silver holdings is represented by physical silver, identified on the Custodian’s or, if applicable, sub-custodian's, books in allocated and unallocated accounts on behalf of the Trust and is held by the Custodian in London, New York and other locations that may be authorized in the future."
Join me brothers. Lets take silver to the moon and take on the biggest and baddest manipulators in the world. Please post rocket emojis in the comments as desired.
Disclaimer: do your own research, make your own decisions, everything here is a guess and hypothetical and nothing is guaranteed, not a financial advisor, I have ADHD and maybe other things too.
Bear case: silver does tend to sell off if the broader market plunges so it’s not immune to broad market sell off. It’s also the most manipulated market in the world so we are facing some tough competition on the short side

Tonight’s report has been built up to be a make or break point for GME. I want to caution my fellow autists from reading too much into this single piece of data. Let’s start with what we know about tonight’s report:
1) This report is based on self reported data.
2) The fine for misreporting, if caught, is pennies on the dollar compared to the costs to cover.
3) The data report covers up until the 29th.
So what are the possible outcomes:
1) Data is accurate, HF covered: I believe at this point GME becomes a long play. There is the potential for an acquisition or a turn around/pivot in the business model. The play is buy (DCA) and hold.
2) Data is accurate, HF did not cover: I believe the play here would be to buy as much as you can. This would push up the price pushing more expiring calls ITM and put further pressure on the HF. We would likely get a significant influx of new investment interest from retail and the squeeze is on. The play is buy and hold.
3) Data is inaccurate: This is the most likely outcome given the money at stake. If it shows they haven’t covered then there would be no real sense in putting out false data. If it shows they have covered then it becomes a gut call. Personally, the continued bots and media coverage seem to still indicate that something is amiss otherwise why go through all that effort, expense, etc. The play is buy (DCA) and hold.
In all three scenarios buy and hold seems to be the most prudent course of action. The only reason to sell IMHO is if you believe GME will go bankrupt.
Ok so I’m going to buy if I can or continue to hold ... what could happen that would turn this around?
1) If not covered, a whale investor or fund deciding to purchase this serving as a catalyst for a true squeeze. Elon, Cuban, another HF, etc. Personally,I have my Tesla in my shopping cart already.
2) If not covered, GME reverse stock split. This could force a true squeeze though likely would not happen until the stock gets back into single digits.
3) If not covered, emergency shareholder meeting. My understanding this would cause a recalling of shares to allow the shareholders to vote, this initiating the squeeze.
4) If covered or uncovered, significant renewed public interest in GME. A lot more likely if uncovered, but it’s a strange world we live in so I wouldn’t completely rule it out if they covered.
5) If covered or uncovered, GME public offering of 10 million shares at $x price (we will say $200). This sets a bottom for the stock in the short term, I believe most who are already in the stock would see value in putting billions into the company coffers either for stock support on a cash balance basis or to be a war chest to facilitate the turn around. I am actually a bit puzzled why this hasn’t already been done.
6) If covered, GME being acquired by a major player at a reasonable price. This would ensure continuing good will from the existing shareholders and would ensure the GameStop name lives on.
7) If covered, GME makes a strategic purchase or alliance that then starts to justify a higher evaluation.
Obviously these are the thoughts of some retarded ape. Full disclosure, I am currently down around 100k in my positions on GME. In my mind, the invested funds were completely lost at the moment of purchase so it doesn’t bother me to hold forever or until I win, whichever comes first. 🦍🙌💎🚀🌕
Edit: The report is supposed to reflect until the 29th.
Update: It appears the FINRA report officially states 78.46%.

A friend of mine just sent this over to me. He's a noob and I'm a noob but in the true spirit of karma whoring for fake internet points I wanted to share and they said it's my funeral. Note we are both total retards, noobs and have no skin in the game cuz we too poor and can only afford plain popcorn, but we desperately want to see WSB succeed and Power to the Players! Do not take this as financial advice or god have mercy on your soul.
Uh guys… so we may see a crash that makes Enron look like a joke. There could be more than a short going on here, and more than firms pulling capital from other companies to cover.
I don’t mean to go all conspiracy theory on you, but hear me out.... I think everything is going so off-the-rails not because of the short, but because Vanguard, Fidelity and BlackRock have sold more stock than exists. This is illegal (duh) but it has happened lots of times in the past. In fact, we didn't have real laws against it until 2008. We may see some bizarre moves if WSB doesn't sell, because some people need to hide some crimes. No joke. Here's why I think this may be the case:
---------- The Background ----------
Read this first to understand how naked shorts work:
https://www.sec.gov/about/offices/ocie/options-trading-risk-alert.pdf
Basically, to short a stock, you must “borrow” the stock from another account, usually something like a margin account. This is something that typically the clearing house does on behest of the fund doing the shorting. Most people don’t even know when their shares are being borrowed by a hedge fund for the purposes of shorting.
A “naked short” is when you short a stock, but don’t confirm that the stock you are borrowing actually exists. This can happen when a clearing house either purposefully or inadvertently (ahem, sure) lends the same stock more than once. This basically clones the stock, just like an item cloning glitch in a video game. There are now two copies of the same stock in existence being actively traded… at least temporarily. Hold that thought.
Naked shorts can be devastating to the company being shorted, as not only do they lose liquidity because of the short, the cloned stocks serve to dilute the value of the real stocks being held by artificially increasing the number of stocks being traded. Especially for small companies doing initial investment rounds, this practically guarantees bankruptcy: the diluted value limits the amount of capital they can raise, as the company never sees the cash from the cloned stock.
Now, after the 2008 crash the SEC in theory made this illegal. Obviously, this practice kills companies if the short succeeds or destroys markets if the short doesn’t succeed. Either way, someone gets hurt.
HOWEVER, there’s a catch: Because hedge funds and clearing houses are permitted to operate behind closed doors, the SEC can only detect a naked short when a “failure to deliver” occurs. When someone calls the short, either because of a buy or because someone withdraws the right to loan their shares, the person shorting then has 3 days to deliver. If they can’t deliver the share (because it doesn’t exist) within 3 days, then this gets reported as a “failure to deliver”. Now, the SEC may look past a few of these because floats do happen, but too many and the SEC is obligated to open an investigation.
But of course, that never happens. The clearinghouse only has to report the net deliveries, not the actual transactions. This means that as long as there is someone buying on the day the failure-to-deliver would occur, the clearinghouse can roll the transaction forward… basically just like floating a check. The non-existent cloned stock is bought with the new buy, and the sell of real shares that should have covered that buy is left open but doesn’t need to be fulfilled for three more days. The clock resets. This is sort of like somebody-I-know used to do by floating checks back and forth between two different bank accounts: keeping the money in the air for several weeks until payday by continually writing checks to cover checks. Super unethical, but does work.
But, this can’t be continued indefinitely. There are SEC rules that make it tough to do this for longer than 21 days. IANAL, I don’t know every loophole, but that’s my understanding.
This is why after 2008 it became so important for the hedge fund to bankrupt the target company. If the company goes bankrupt, then the shares cease to be and the books never resolve. Even some kinds of restructuring can keep the books from resolving. It’s still possible to cover this without bankrupting the company if you can get enough people to sell, but it’s easier to crash the company and just make it all go away while pocketing cash from more shares than were ever real.
---------- The WSB Play ----------
Ok, now read this:
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4370860-gamestop-short-squeeze
This was basically the original WSB plan back from October. Don't worry about the plan... we know what's going on here already. Melvin Capital shorted by 140% which is more than the float. Gamestop had enough cash to cover debt so it seemed unlikely they would fail unless the hedge funds forced it to. Squeeze looks obvious when you lay it out that way.
BUT, there is one chart here that is super important when folks were trying to figure this out: look at the chart for institutional ownership!
https://i.imgur.com/Jh5AI8V.png
The top three names on that chart are Vanguard, Blackrock and Fidelity. As is suggested by the author, there is a strong likelihood that the top holders already loaned out all their shares to Melvin Capital. The shares had to come from somewhere, and this is the only place they could have come.
This is why some people thought this was a good move. Not just because there was a short, but because they could see that all the shares had already been “borrowed” which would force the hedge fund to buy at any price. There were simply no more shares available to option for any other kind of fuckery.
---------- The Expected Response ----------
Okay, so WSB made their move. And predictably Robinhood and a bunch of trading platforms cut the ability to buy GME. Seems obvious enough as a strategy to stem the bleeding, regardless of whether it is coming from Robinhood or, as they claim, the brokerage above them limiting trades for reasons. Whatever. Either way, this is an obvious response.
Likewise, there have been numerous pushes from the hedge funds to either convince WSB the positions are closed, or to convince them to change their position from GME to Silver.
Despite what the news is reporting, no one in WSB appears to be buying silver. Maybe someone is, but it ain’t them. I did a site-wide search for silver, then pulled the post history for all the accounts that made the posts--of which there are shockingly few compared to what the news media is implying. The only accounts promoting this appear to be mostly bots: they became reddit premium within the last week, or they are necro accounts that have no posts for two or three years until suddenly dozens of silver related posts in the last few days. Conversely, there are been numerous long standing accounts warning others that these silver posts are bots.
None of this is unexpected. Bots and media manipulation have been par for the course for political bullshit for the last few years.
Boots on the ground, I have literally no idea where the news media is getting this story other than a change in silver pricing. I am not seeing any such discussion in related communities, and certainly none that pre-dates the news stories! To be fair and avoid conspiracy: I don’t hang out on twitter. There are retail traders outside of Reddit, and perhaps the media is clumping multiple groups together and mistaking Twitter for Reddit. Wouldn’t be the first time. Even on 4chan /b/ is not /pol/ and so on. People make that mistake all the time, so the misrepresentation may be entirely unintentional. I know the internet is a weird weird place and not everyone gets how it works.
The last expected response is the fact that many of the hedge funds bought new short positions, especially assuming that most of Reddit would sell on Friday. (Which they did not) There are additional short positions held that expect WSB to fold within the next week. This coincides with the news reports expecting people to try to collect their profits. Of course, many people don't intend to do that. They aren't worried about the profits they want to see hedge funds go down.
But all this movement leads to an obvious question: If there are no shares available to borrow, then what are they borrowing against for the short??
---------- Clearing Houses are Sus ----------
Okay, soooo…. We expect Wall Street to prevent buying GME, which they have; and to unleash bots to change sentiment, which they have; and to promote news stories to try to change the situation, which they have.
BUT, with all of this, there are two retail trading platforms that are still allowing GME trades: Vanguard and Fidelity. There is also one firm that started buying GameStop themselves five days ago: BlackRock. Sound like a familiar list?????? These are the firms that held the shares that the hedge funds were borrowing against to short.
Now, if all the funds are trying to stop the bleeding, WHY would these firms still allow trading when no one else is… much less start buying themselves?
Unless…. The shares DON’T EXIST.
You can’t float a check between two accounts without writing another check. Someone needs to buy the shares in order to push the failure-to-deliver of the non-existent cloned stock into the future, otherwise the gig is up and the SEC finds out. If Vanguard and Fidelity become the only source for Redditors to buy from, then they can keep moving the doomsday clock forward. BlackRock can do the same thing by buying the stock themselves. Not as good a position, but not a lot of other choice if they need the books to read clean. Ok, someone with more experience than me can surely explain this better as there are some gotchas, but that's the basic gist.
More proof those shares don’t exist? This academic paper from last year gives a clue:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3673531
Even if you own shares, you can’t vote in a shareholder’s meeting if your shares have been loaned out. Less than half of GameStop shareholders were eligible to vote by April of last year, with even fewer by August! There were so many shares borrowed SIX MONTHS AGO that it was affecting GameStop’s ability to hold a quorum among shareholders.
Now the paper was only concerned about how short selling was affecting company’s ability to administer. The idea that these were naked shorts never came up AFAIK. But knowing what we do now, this seems increasingly likely.
Also, for good measure beyond academia, this was in the news from last year:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-investing-giants-gave-away-voting-power-ahead-of-a-shareholder-fight-11591793863
If you look at the volume that WSB has bought since then, and the amount held in options, and the amount of shares that have been borrowed against in the last week or two as hedge funds have placed a second set of shorts… well… it sure looks like there are way more shares on the market THAN EXIST. Of course, without having the records from the clearing houses, AFAIK there's no way to know for sure. Only the SEC can do that.
I don’t mean the bet WSB played… that Marvin had 140% of the FLOAT. I mean that Vanguard, Fidelity and BlackRock have sold more than the TOTAL SHARES that EXIST.
That's a completely different problem and it's punishable by jail time. Not a joke. It's basically counterfeiting stock shares, although that's not the terminology used. If this is true, who knows how many other times they’ve done this. Or maybe it's not true, and they just really like the stock??? If BlackRock started buying five days ago, and the longest they can likely do this is 21 days, then the doomsday clock doesn’t run out until at least February 17th. If Wall Street can get WSB to sell before then, then they won’t get caught and won’t go to jail. But if they don’t…. well, this will make Enron look like chump change.
If enough people hold until the end of February, and this is truly the situation, then there is a chance that major parts of Wall Street are going to IMPLODE.
---------- The Conclusion ----------
Apes need diamond hands until the end of February in order to get the SEC involved, most likely somewhere between Feb 17th - 19th. Whether or not this will happen is anybody's guess, but if it does all heck may break loose!
Wall Street will probably do everything in their power to prevent that. There are too many top players involved. Crazy moves are likely because stock brokers are smooshy and jail is uncomfortable.
This may effect the market. (Duh) Bloomberg may be correct, but not at all for the reasons stated. But, that said, I wouldn't panic if it does. I think it will be fine in the long run, but that's a whole other set of reasoning for another day.
Standard Disclaimer: This is not financial or legal advice. I am a retard and I have no idea what I am talking about. This is entirely speculation. :)
Edit: here is the link to my second attempt to post to WSB, maybe a mod can reverse the removal? The post still shows listed on my end: https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/la9ms9/follow_the_crumbs_gme_exposed_the_meta/
Edit 2: Ok so don't ask me for stock advice. I don't know stocks and neither does my friend. We both think holding is the right move but beyond that we don't know and could even be wrong about that. And furthermore I don't want this to come off like we're accusing these companies of nefarious deeds. We don't know what is going on. The data is sus. The activities are sus. Google is your friend and the post tries to list sources for the research. Do your own research though! For ducks sake this is a rando post on UserSub. I'm happy to see the love but this is a one shot research dump by someone who knows nothing about this topic.
Edit 3: u/traveljg has commented that Blackrock is on the record for selling not buying but I don't know enough about any of this to challenge the idea one way or another and my friend is off on some other crusade at this point so he's worthless for questions. This is why it is SUPER important that you do your own research and not take advice from a rando.
Edit 4: I'm not responding to chat requests. If you have comments make them on the post. What is wrong with you retards?

Thesis: GME short interest may stand at minimum 107% since January 27th. Only 35% of pre-squeeze shorts may have been covered since January 27th.
"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."-Mark Twain
------
I) The Short Interest Numbers
Short interest ("SI") is calculated by shares shorted over total outstanding shares. See https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/shortinterest.asp. Apparently other firms have used different versions of float. All other forms of float are likely incorrect, and not likely used by Finra. This is an important assumption - if I am wrong here, then fuck.
Edit (to above): People are suggesting my float is wrong. That is exactly my point. I am using float as outstanding shares b/c we don't know what it is. If someone actually knows the float used by FINRA, post it; this post is then useless. The math working backwards from 226% is fair game, however. That's why it's possible I'm wrong (see https://www.highshortinterest.com/). See also comment by JeanGuyRubberboots below (ctrl+f). Either way, it's remarkable that $GME on some sources is still the most shorted stock. I want to see the actual float used by FINRA. Until then, here's the math based on the SI equation.
Total outstanding shares of GME is 69.75 million. See https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GME/key-statistics/.
Finra SI of GME is .78 as of January 27th. See http://finra-markets.morningstar.com/MarketData/EquityOptions/detail.jsp?query=126%3A0P000002CH&sdkVersion=2.58.0.
.78*69.75 million = 54.405m. Thus, 54.045m million shares are short GME of January 27th.
To calculate real SI, we remove insider ownership. Another big assumption. Insider ownership stands at 19.06m. See https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GME/insider-transactions/.
Thus, free float is outstanding shares less insider ownership shares. 50,750,000 shares.
Real SI appears, at minimum, 1.07 (54.405m/50.750m).
----
II) The Shorts Remaining and Covered
On January 15th, GME SI stood at 121%. See https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/are-these-the-best-heavily-shorted-stocks-to-buy-right-now-5-names-to-watch-2021-01-31.
Thus, from January 15th to the 27th, we know at least 84.397m shares were shorted. (1.21*outstanding shares).
By January 27th, 54.405m shorts remained (previous short amounts minus current shorts remaining as of 1.27). The number of shorts that covered from Jan. 15th to the 27th was was 29.992m. 29.992m/84.397m shares = ~35%. Thus, 65% of shorts pre-squeeze remain, owing APR.
Around ~35% of covering resulted in a 1,600% rise. Thus, a 65% cover rate (conservative) can yield a 2,971% rise. Let’s apply this math to now. From $50, this is a $1,485.50 GME price result. Could this happen? No idea. Notice the problem with this: I'm assuming only covering led to this rise. So this is simply a demonstrative point.
New shorts from Jan. 27th to present likely opened at higher prices. 65% of those from $5, $10, $20, etc., probably remain. This is bad news for HF's.
III) The Effect
Based on estimated remaining covers, price stagnation at $50 could result in further covering and collateral calls. This burden is reduced if HF's opened new shorts at the peak and they are substantially ITM. This part is unclear. We know it's very likely that HF's opened new shorts at the peak--- what isn't clear is that it was within their risk department's policy to open new shorts during a fucking squeeze. In my opinion, it wasn't until drops below <$200 the HF's felt safe opening up new shorts. This is a substantial point: if the new shorts are at much lower price points than thought, then the pain points for HF's are far lower. It's just unclear. Nonetheless, HF's may be bleeding substantially every week because of those remaining shorts.
A good counter is that borrow rates currently seem low for new positions. See https://iborrowdesk.com/report/GME. You'd think these are correlated markets, so the most shorted stock on the market would have higher borrow rates. Borrow rates could be low because it's no longer shorted. Or because there is no volume on the stock. I'm not sure what borrow rates are for open short positions, but I imagine they're higher. I don't know more beyond this. Feel free to debate.
Moreover, consider the current liquidity and volume of $GME. It appears that retail buying power is spent. People either cashed out or are holding. So, they are unlikely to trigger the next squeeze - or a gamma one for that matter. Thus, the fighting grounds has likely gone institutional. Not all hedge funds are short $GME - nor are all financial whales. In my view, this has become an institutional fight, with both sides pointing the gun at each other, waiting who's going to pull the trigger first. Retail is simply on the sidelines, holding the clips in for both their guns (smirking, of course). How long until every chump with a few million bucks laying around realizes this is still the most shorted stock on the market before they infuse substantial buying pressure? Or I guess one Moby Dick will do it. My reservations in these predictions is that HF's are smart, they can't be fooled twice, etc., and all of that non-sense. But before intelligence comes greed. And I know greed and desperation has always governed the financial system.
IV) Parting Thoughts
It would take a half-brained monkey 45 seconds to crunch the short interest numbers. Yet Finra was late (posted after hours I think). This is the most shorted stock on the market according to my numbers - yet, again, dead silence from the mainstream media. Sources are using various versions of float to calculate SI, as if suddenly short interest is something that be manipulated based on our interests. Americans with $2,000 in their checkings account are being investigated for stock fraud.
The Big Short is illustrative. It depicts how corruption and fraud has always been the building blocks of our financial institutions. Put differently, fraud doesn't just pervade the system - nay, it is the system. Everything I've seen just doesn't feel right. Understand at this point I'm speculating. But I trust my gut.
There are also posts suggesting OTM/ITM options are encouraging institutional price manipulations of $GME. This is beyond my knowledge span. However, if you looked at the bid-ask spreads this week of $GME, they were at times pennies apart for days. I've never seen that before. Seriously, what the fuck.
DFV is testifying alongside the CEO's of Robinhood, Citadel, and Melvin Capital. Next Thursday is a day to watch for me. Again $GME will be the most discussed and watched stock in America - and, arguably, the globe. Americans and the world will be reminded why their holdings in $GME tanked 50-90%. For many, their life savings. No, it wasn't a result of imprudent investments -- to invest money into a squeezing stock is a good idea short-term. It was the clearing houses pulling the plugs because the financial system was never designed for working people to make that much money. So when the risk of you getting that rich increased, they stopped the game (pun intended). We don't even need to get into whether there was intentional collusion - that's just speculation, and it doesn't even matter to establish how messed up this is. But think of how this plays out: these institutions either bullshit their way through the hearing and everyone and their moms sees past it. Or they tell you the truth that, based on risk management and capital models, they never thought retail would get that rich that fast. Either way, I don't think it'll play out well for them other than DFV on national television. A key element to the public's reaction: AOC grilling the hell out of these folks. That will likely infuriate a lot of Americans watching.
And to set the record straight, I don't think retail is propping $GME at $50 because they have diamond hands -- middle America is holding because they have nothing to lose after the clearing houses and Robinhood tanked their portfolios by over half. So their plan to kill off retail interest backfired. In the process of stunting buying pressure, they inadvertently made chunks of working America diamond holders. Poetic justice - and fucking hilarious.
I'm not demonizing rich people. We all want financial freedom. I'm demonizing cheating the game. However this ends one thing is clear: The Big Squeeze is going to be an epic movie.
TLDR: it's in the damn title.
--
Disclaimer because working people are vilified when the financial system is exposed - does this sound familiar? It should because it's a reoccurring pattern. When rich people lose, poor people are blamed and we foot the bill: I'm a random guy on the internet stating my opinions so if you take my advice to do anything without your own research, you are dumb. This DD could be garbage. If you disagree, comment below and counter me. I don't want an echo chamber. Not a GME promotion, just more DD.

admins removed mods and gave control back

comment from Mod about it

I'll definitely post a more thorough summary later, but here's a direct quote from the admins:
After reviewing this situation based on input from both current and past moderators, we have decided to remove several moderators at the top of the list that were creating instability in the community.
With regards to zjz coming back, that's a question only he can answer!

TL;DR: With what´s going on with Gamestop Stock, wallstreetbets got over 7 million new Users, with Netflix Announcing to make a Movie about it the inactive Mods (OG) at WSB are trying to Profit of of it and are removing active Mods and making New created accounts Mods with Full Permission. Theres even Speculation about a Pump &amp;amp; Dump Scheme
Edit: YouTube Video explaining everything: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ATEn3cm7Us4

Proof of Mods trying to profit from this all:

https://imgur.com/a/6mErVap screenshots of the discord chat to sell out WSB
Thread on wallstreetbets about whats going on The mod is actively deleting comments which ask for proof or post the screenshot above
Its still going on. Over at wallstreetbets everything is getting removed. While the removed Mods created wallstreetbetstest
Proof of removed comments and posts:
Post from u/zjz in wallstreetbets test about whats going on, WHICH GOT REMOVED
What u/Stylus postet before it got REMOVED
u/jamsi about whats going on, which also got REMOVED
WSB own discord gets in the drama link 1 link 2
Even here are posts about it removed link
Comment from u/OlyBomaye about the removal from u/zjz: click
&amp;gt;For any outsiders reading this, Zjz is the mod who has been around the longest, is most responsible for building the subreddit into what it is, has created all the bot mods that police the content of the sub, etc. He's the dude holding the whole thing together. He should have been the head mod in the first place but previous Subreddit Drama in early 2020 left a close personal friend of the original founder, who was removed by the admins for attempting to monetize the subreddit by selling investment classes run by noted losers of money, as the head mod. The actual head mod is generally inactive and has only recently returned to, apparently, personally profit off the recent growth and notoriety of the subreddit. WSB in scrambles. Additional notes/context from u/fufm Only other points I would add.. • ⁠He is really the only true voice that communicates consistently with the people • ⁠He has demonstrated again and again that his motivation is to make the sub a better place, with no regard for personal gain • ⁠His ideas are actually good. Like for instance, his angle on the Twitter thing was to make it an auto-algo generated thing based on overall trends in the sub. Infinitely better idea than the cringe factory bullshit they were posting there initially. • ⁠He actually gets the sub
Removed Mods from wsb from u/DeathHopper:
&amp;gt;Here's a screen shot of the recent mod changes: CLICK
Megathread about the removing from mods in correlation with market pumps from u/brave_potato:
click
From u/frostfall_:
&amp;gt;Zjz statement that was removed by new wsb mods:
CLICK
New Users made mods with full permission from u/MaiClay:
click
u/Tentings explaining whats going on for the uninitiated:
&amp;gt;To try to explain it rather briefly in case you don't feel like reading other sources, the original foundemod of the sub was forcefully removed by admins last year after he attempted to monetize the sub by creating a real "e-sport like" trading competition, and he began shilling a trading group business that was rather shady (which he was found to have ties with).&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;gt;Fast forward to now, one of the top mods who has shouldered most of the responsibility for the sub, maintaining bots, interacting with the community, doing most of the mod duties, etc was stripped of his mod powers by the highest ranking mod of the sub. This higher ranking mod is a personal friend of the original founder, has been extremely inactive for the past year or so, and has only returned once the sub gained mainstream popularity. The mod that was ousted made a post that was hastily deleted stating that the highest rating mod and company have been making deals with outside entities in what is another attempt to monetize the sub in the way of movie deals, something to do with the Winklevoss twins, funneling all outside inquiries to private email addresses, etc. &amp;gt; &amp;gt;All in all, just Reddit drama. But the sub seems to have issues with top mods periodically attempting to monetize on recent attention. &amp;gt; &amp;gt;Edit: To add to this, all this occurred late last night when the majority of users were asleep. As of right now the sub is beginning to pick up in terms of activity due to people waking up. The current mod team (that ousted the mod that was held in high regard) brought on a bunch of new mods who have accounts that are less than a week old. These mods are now doing a rather effective job at deleting and banning anyone that brings up this abrupt change in leadership, and any mention of the mod that was kicked. With that said, most users over there are unaware of this change of leadership and unaware that the “captain of the ship” is “selling out” the subreddit. And of course, half the sub just doesn’t care and wants to talk about GameStop.
u/disabledsexrobot (lol) did step down as mod to support u/zjz
&amp;gt;Today has been a really bad day. I took notice at work today that u/bawse1 and u/zjz and other mods hand been kicked out by the old mods who once again has decided to try to attempt a take over and monetize the sub.During my time as a mod I have never even really spoken to them except for replying to grebfar in a thread. I've never really see them mod or run the subreddit in any capacity. It was fun while it lasted. u/zjz as a prevoius subscriber and moderator alongside you in wallstreetbets, thank you for all the incredible hard work you put into the bots that made it possible to moderate a sub of that size. I know you have worked your fingers to the bone tapping away at the keyboard to code those.To everyone else, I want you to know that I always loved wallstreetbets as a community and I in no way, shape or form wish to be associated with jartek and the other old mods. This is the second time they attempt to do a hostile take over of our beloved community. They're nothing but dishonest and deceptive.
TL;DR: With what´s going on with Gamestop Stock, wallstreetbets got over 7 million new Users, with Netflix Announcing to make a Movie about it the inactive Mods (OG) at WSB are trying to Profit of of it and are removing active Mods and making New created accounts Mods with Full Permission. Theres even Speculation about a Pump &amp;amp;amp;amp; Dump Scheme
edited for better Visibility

My ex and I divorced three years ago. She was cheating, but at this point I don’t care about the relationship anymore. The pending lawsuit has nothing to do with her or him, but rather their actions.
My ex and I have a son 13m that we split time with 50/50. He’s a great kid that interests have changed a lot tbh as I imagine more kids/teenagers tend to do through the years.
One thing my son was heavily into at some point was legos. He use to play with them all the time, and personally I think they’re a great toy for different reasons. I use to love playing them with him, and to this day I still collect boxes that I leave unopened as a collection.
Well when my ex and I divorced she got with someone who loved legos more I guess? From what I know he loves making creations and building the sets in. I don’t care.. seems cool. He does one thing I think is very very weird.. He uses crazy glue so the sets can’t break or pieces can’t be lost. It seems so weird to me.
The issue is, I was out of town for all of three days last week for medical reasons, and my son wanted to get his ps4 so he could play it at his moms. This isn’t out of the ordinary at all and he has a key, so he let me know he would be stopping over for it. I told him to have fun when I saw him on the entry camera. My wife’s husband was with him which was a no-no. I told him via speaker to not go in and to wait on the porch.
He flinched but walked in any way. I sent my ex a text telling her to call him and tell him he’s one minute away from a cop call. He left my home with a bag in hand which I didn’t think much of because my son had his games too.
Well my son texted me later that evening and said he didn’t know it at the time but he’s pretty sure SD took some of my sets. These are all old sets and two are worth big money. When I got home I confirmed the missing sets and called my ex. She had no idea but he admired he took them but it was so son could have the sets to complete his collection... my son doesn’t even like legos anymore and told his mom he wouldn’t steal from me.
My wife asked how much it would cost to replace them and unfortunately it’s more than their savings. Actually, it would take their house down payment plus more. I told them if they didn’t pay in two weeks I was suing and pressing charges. The price in the sets makes it a felony.
My ex and her husband are saving for a house which would give my son more space when he’s there, but those sets were going help pay for his education someday or a home of his own. I filed the police report and have talked to a lawyer and we’re moving forward with the suit.
Everyone is calling me a joke because they are just toys, but I don’t get it. They are worth real money.. I’m not rich guys. I needed those to help with my sons future... but again taking this money does deny my son things at his moms house.
AITA here??
Edit* I’ve been asked to add these facts.
The sets have been opened which more than half their worth, and one was glued together. The damage was done already.
The stolen items are:
Kings Castle Milk truck Lego land train Carousel And the glued one was a Star Wars snow speeder.
Some of these are one piece of a larger set. So if you lose one of five, you lose the value of one produce plus the value of the set as a whole.
Second edit*
Ex wife and boyfriend are the same as ex boyfriend.. I’m just a bad writer.
Third/final edit for this post*
I know I haven’t been here much but I have read many of your comments and taken them to heart. I know my spelling is poor guys, and I apologize for the format. Calling me names in my private message was not called for, and I am not a scalper. I enjoy buying these sets and do not intend to sell all of them, but I want my son to go to college and not worry about debt, so I want to sell the ones that I can to help. I never had the smarts for higher education but my son is not me, and I love him and want him to do better.
Around 4:00 PM I called the local state police and met at their facility. I gave them all I had and gave my statement.
My son is with me starting tonight so when I picked him up I sent him into GameStop and called his mom. I told her I had filed charges and I asked the cop to call me when everything was done so I could give him the opportunity to turn himself in. I wanted to be better than he treated me. I’ll save her reaction for a real update btw—- can someone please tell me how to update because I don’t really understand the steps in the main notes.
I told my son when we got home what I did and why. My son said that I did the right thing because he didn’t want his step dad to think it was ok to do it again, and if he didn’t go to jail he’d rather be her away from him so it isn’t weird.

Disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor. This entire post represents my personal views and opinions, and should not be taken as financial advice (or advice of any kind whatsoever). I encourage you to do your own research, take anything I write with a grain of salt, and hold me accountable for any mistakes you may catch. Also, full disclosure, I hold a net long position in GME, but my cost basis is very low (average ~$67--I have to admit, the drop today was too tasty so my cost basis went up from yesterday)/share with my later buys averaged in), and I'm using money I can absolutely lose. My capital at risk and tolerance for risk generally is likely substantially different than yours. In this post I will go a little further and speculate more than I'd normally do in a post due to the questions I've been getting, so fair warning, some of it might be very wrong. I suspect we'll learn some of the truth years from now when some investigative journalist writes a book about it.
Thank you everyone for the comments and questions on the first and second post on this topic.
Today was a study in the power of fear, courage, and the levers you can pull when you wield billions of dollars...
Woops, excuse me. I'm sorry hedge fund guys... I meant trillions of dollars--I just briefly forget you control not just your own but a lot of other peoples' money too for a moment there.
Also, for people still trading this on market-based rationale (as I am), it was a good day to measure the conviction behind your thesis. I like to think I have conviction, but in case you are somehow not yet familiar with the legend of DFV, you need to see these posts (fair warning, nsfw, and some may be offended/triggered by the crude language). The last two posts might be impressive, but you should follow it in chronological order and pay attention to the evolution of sentiment in the comments to experience true enlightenment.
Anyway, I apologize, but this post will be very long--there's just a lot to unpack.

Pre-Market

Disclaimer: given yesterday's pre-market action I didn't even pay attention to the screen until near retail pre-market. I'm less confident in my ability to read what's going on in a historical chart vs the feel I get watching live, but I'll try.
Early in the pre-market it looks to me like some momentum traders are taking profit, discounting the probability that the short-side will give them a deep discount later, which you can reasonably assume given the strategy they ran yesterday. If they're right they can sell some small volume into the pre-market top, wait for the hedge funds try to run the price back down, and then lever up the gains even higher buying the dip. Buy-side here look to me like people FOMOing and YOLOing in at any price to grab their slice of gainz, or what looks to be market history in the making. No way are short-side hedge funds trying to cover anything at these prices.
Mark Cuban--well said! Free markets baby!
Mohamed El-Erian is money in the bank as always. "upgrade in quality" on the pandemic drop was the best, clearest actionable call while most were at peak panic, and boy did it print. Your identifying the bubble as the excessive short (vs blaming retail activity) is money yet again. Also, The PAIN TRADE (sorry, later interview segment I only have on DVR, couldn't find on youtube--maybe someone else can)!
The short attack starts, but I'm hoping no one was panicking this time--we've seen it before. Looks like the momentum guys are minting money buying the double dip into market open.
CNBC, please get a good market technician to explain the market action. Buy-side dominance, sell-side share availability evaporating into nothing (look at day-by-day volume last few days), this thing is now at runaway supercritical mass. There is no changing the trajectory unless you can change the very fabric of the market and the rules behind it (woops, I guess I should have knocked on wood there).
If you know the mechanics, what's happening in the market with GME is not mysterious AT ALL. I feel like you guys are trying to scare retail out early "for their own good" (with all sincerity, to your credit) rather than explain what's happening. Possibly you also fear that explaining it would equate to enabling/encouraging people to keep trying to do it inappropriately (possibly fair point, but at least come out and say that if that's the case). Outside the market, however...wow.

You Thought Yesterday Was Fear? THIS is Fear!

Ok short-side people, my hat is off to you. Just when I thought shouting fire in a locked theater was fear mongering poetry in motion, you went and took it to 11. What's even better? Yelling fire in a theater with only one exit. That way people can cause the financial equivalent of stampede casualties. Absolutely brilliant.
Robin Hood disables buying of GME, AMC, and a few of the other WSB favorites. Other brokerages do the same. Even for people on 0% margin. Man, and here I thought I had seen it all yesterday.
Side note: I will give a shout out to TD Ameritrade. You guys got erroneously lumped together with RH during an early CNBC segment, but you telegraphed the volatility risk management changes and gradually ramped up margin requirements over the past week. No one on your platform should have been surprised if they were paying attention. And you didn't stop anyone from trading their own money at any point in time. My account balance thanks you. I heard others may have had problems, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt given the DDOS attacks that were flyiing around
Robin Hood. Seriously WTF. I'm sure it was TOTALLY coincidence that your big announcements happen almost precisely when what has to be one of the best and most aggressive short ladder attacks of all time starts painting the tape, what looked like a DDOS attack on Reddit's CDN infrastructure (pretty certain it was the CDN because other stuff got taken out at the same time too), and a flood of bots hit social media (ok, short-side, this last one is getting old).
Taking out a large-scale cloud CDN is real big boy stuff though, so I wouldn't entirely rule out nation state type action--those guys are good at sniffing out opportunities to foment social unrest.
Anyway, at this point, as the market dives, I have to admit I was worried for a moment. Not that somehow the short-side would win (hah! the long-side whales in the pond know what's up), but that a lot of retail would get hurt in the action. That concern subsided quite a bit on the third halt on that slide. But first...
A side lesson on market orders
Someone printed bonus bank big time (and someone lost--I feel your pain, whoever you are).
During the face-ripping volatility my play money account briefly ascended to rarified heights of 7 figures. It took me a second to realize it, then another second to process it. Then, as soon as it clicked, that one, glorious moment in time was gone.
What happened?
During the insane chop of the short ladder attack, someone decided to sweep the 29 Jan 21 115 Call contracts, but they couldn't get a grip on the price, which was going coast to coast as IV blew up and the price was being slammed around. So whoever was trying to buy said "F it, MARKET ORDER" (i.e. buy up to $X,XXX,XXX worth of contracts at any price). This is referred to as a sweep if funded to buy all/most of the contracts on offer (HFT shops snipe every contract at each specific price with a shotgun of limit orders, which is far safer, but something only near-market compute resources can do really well). For retail, or old-tech pros, if you want all the contracts quickly, you drop a market order loaded with big bucks and see what you get... BUT, some clever shark had contracts available for the reasonable sum of... $4,400, or something around that. I was too stunned to grab a screencap. The buy market order swept the book clean and ran right into that glorious, nigh-obscene backstop limit. So someone got nearly $440,000 PER CONTRACT that was, at the time theoretically priced at around $15,000. $425,000 loss... PER CONTRACT. Maybe I'm not giving the buyer enough credit.. you can get sniped like that even if you try to do a safety check of the order book first, but, especially in low liquidity environments, if a HFT can peak into your order flow (or maybe just observes a high volume of sweeps occurring), they can end up front running your sweep, pick off the reasonable contracts, and slam a ridiculous limit sell order into place before your order makes it to the exchange. Either way, I hope that sweep wasn't loaded for bear into the millions. If so... OUCH. Someone got cleaned out.
So, the lesson here folks... in a super high volatility, low-liquidity market, a market order will just run up the ladder into the first sell order it can find, and some very brutal people will put limit sells like that out there just in case they hit the jackpot. And someone did. If you're on the winning side, great. It can basically bankrupt you if you're on the losing side. My recommendation: Just don't try it. I wouldn't be surprised if really shady shenanigans were involved in this, but no way to know (normally that's crazy-type talk, but after today....peeking at order flow and sniping sweeps is one of the fastest, most financially devastating ways to bleed big long-side players, just sayin').
edit *so while I was too busy trying not to spit out my coffee to grab a screenshot, piddlesthethug was faster on the draw and captured this: https://imgur.com/gallery/RI1WOuu
Ok, so I guess my in-the-moment mental math was off by about 10%. Man, that hurts just thinking about the guy who lost on that trade.*
Back to the market action..

A Ray of Light Through the Darkness

So I was worried watching the crazy downward movement for two different reasons.
On the one hand, I was worried the momentum pros would get the best discounts on the dip (I'll admit, I FOMO'd in too early, unnecessarily raising my cost basis).
On the other hand, I was worried for the retail people on Robin Hood who might be bailing out into incredibly steep losses because they had only two options: Watch the slide, or bail. All while dealing with what looked to me like a broad-based cloud CDN outage as they tried to get info from WSB HQ, and wondering if the insta-flood of bot messages were actually real people this time, and that everyone else was bailing on them to leave them holding the bag.
But I saw the retail flag flying high on the 3rd market halt (IIRC), and I knew most would be ok. What did I see, you ask? Why, the glorious $211.00 / $5,000 bid/ask spread. WSB Reddit is down? Those crazy mofos give you the finger right on the ticker tape. I've been asked many times in the last few hours about why I was so sure shorts weren't covering on the down move. THIS is how I knew. For sure. It's in the market data itself.
edit So, there's feedback in the comments that this is likely more of a technical glitch. Man, at least it was hilarious in the moment. But also now I know maybe not to trust price updates when the spread between orders being posted is so wide. Maybe a technical limitation of TOS
I'll admit, I tried to one-up those bros with a 4206.90 limit sell order, but it never made it through. I'm impressed that the HFT guys at the hedge fund must have realized really quickly what a morale booster that kind of thing would have been, and kept a lower backstop ask in place almost continuously from then on I'm sure others tried the same thing. Occasionally $1,000 and other high-dollar asks would peak through from time to time from then on, which told me the long-side HFTs were probably successfully sniping the backstops regularly.
So, translating for those of you who found that confusing. First, such a high ask is basically a FU to the short-side (who, as you remember, need to eventually buy shares to cover their short positions). More importantly, as an indicator of retail sentiment, it meant that NO ONE ELSE WAS TRYING TO SELL AT ANY PRICE LOWER THAN $5,000. Absolutely no one was bailing out.
I laughed for a minute, then started getting a little worried. Holy cow.. NO retail selling into the fear? How are they resisting that kind of price move??
The answer, as we all know now... they weren't afraid... they weren't even worried. They were F*CKING PISSED.
Meanwhile the momentum guys and long-side HFTs keep gobbling up the generously donated shares that the short-side are plowing into their ladder attack. Lots of HFT duels going on as long-side HFTs try to intercept shares meant to travel between short-side HFT accounts for their ladder. You can tell when you see prices like $227.0001 constantly flying across the tape. Retail can't even attempt to enter an order like that--those are for the big boys with privileged low-latency access.
The fact that you can even see that on the tape with human eyes is really bad for the short-side people.
Why, you ask? Because it means liquidity is drying up, and fast.

The Liquidity Tide is Flowing Out Quickly. Who's Naked (short)?

Market technicals time. I still wish this sub would allow pictures so I could throw up a chart, but I guess a table will do fine.
​

Date	Volume	Price at US Market Close
Friday, 1/22/21	197,157,196	$65.01
Monday, 1/25/21	177,874,00	$76.79
Tuesday, 1/26/21	178,587,974	$147.98
Wednesday, 1/27/21	93,396,666	$347.51
Thursday, 1/28/21	58,815,805	$193.60

What do I see? I see the shares available to trade dropping so fast that all the near-exchange compute power in the world won't let the short-side HFTs maintain order flow volume for their attacks. Many retail people asking me questions thought today was the heaviest trading. Nope--it was just the craziest.
What about the price dropping on Thursday? Is that a sign that the short-side pulled a miracle out and pushed price down against a parabolic move on even less volume than Wednesday? Is the long side running out of capital?
Nope. It means the short-side hedge funds are just about finished.
But wait, I thought the price needed to be higher for them to be taken out? How is it that price being lower is bad for them? Won't that allow them to cover at a lower price?
No, the volume is so low that they can't cover any meaningful fraction of their position without spiking the price parabolic almost instantly. Just not enough shares on offer at reasonable prices (especially when WSB keeps flashing you 6942.00s).
It's true, a higher price hurts, but the interest charge for one more day is just noise at this point. The only tick that will REALLY count is the last tick of trading on Friday.
In the meantime, the price drop (and watching the sparring in real time) tells me that the long-side whales and their HFT quants are so certain of the squeeze that they're no longer worried AT ALL about whether it will happen, and they aren't even worried at all about retail morale to help carry the water anymore.
Instead, they're now really, really worried about how CHEAPLY they can make it happen.
They are wondering if they can't edge out just a sliver more alpha out of what will already be a blow-out trade for the history books (probably). You see, to make it happen they just have to keep hoovering up shares. It doesn't matter what those shares cost. If you're certain that the squeeze is now locked in, why push the price up and pay more than you have to? Just keep pressing hard enough to force short-side to keep sending those tasty shares your way, but not so much you move the price. Short-side realizes this and doesn't try to drive price down too aggressively. They can't afford to let price run away, so they have to keep some pressure on at the lowest volume they can manage, but they don't want to push down too hard and give the long-side HFTs too deep of a discount and bleed their ammo out even faster. That dynamic keeps price within a narrow (for GME today, anyway) trading range for the rest of the day into the close.
Good plan guys, but those after market people are pushing the price up again. Damnit WSB bros and Euros, you're costing those poor long-side whales their extra 0.0000001% of alpha on this trade just so you can run up your green rockets... See, that's the kind of nonsense that just validates Lee Cooperman's concerns.
On a totally unrelated note, I have to say that I appreciate the shift in CNBC's reporting. Much more thoughtful and informed. Just please get a good market technician in there who will be willing to talk about what is going on under the hood if possible. A lot of people watching on the sidelines are far more terrified than they need to be because it all looks random to them. And they're worried that you guys look confused and worried--and if the experts on the news are worried....??!
You should be able to find one who has access to the really good data that we retailers can only guess at, who can explain it to us unwashed masses.

Ok, So.. Questions

There is no market justification for this. How can you tell me is this fundamentally sound and not just straight throwing money away irresponsibly?? (side note: not that that should matter--if you want to throw your money away why shouldn't you be allowed to?)
We're not trading in your securities pricing model. This isn't irrational just because your model says long and short positions are the same thing. The model is not a real market. There is asymmetrical counterparty risk here given the shorts are on the hook for all the money they have, and possibly all the money their brokers have, and possibly anyone with exposure to the broker too! You may want people to trade by the rules you want them to follow. But the rest of us trade in the real market as it is actually implemented. Remember? That's what you tell the retailers who take their accounts to zero. Remember what you told the KBIO short-squeezed people? They had fair warning that short positions carry infinite risk, including more than your initial investment. You guys know this. It's literally part of your job to know this.
But-but-the systemic risk!! This is Madness!
...Madness?
THIS. IS. THE MARKET!!! *Retail kicks the short-side hedge funds down an infinity loss black hole\*.
Ok, seriously though, that is actually a fundamentally sound, and properly profit-driven answer at least as justifiable as the hedge funds' justification for going >100% of float short. If they can be allowed to gamble INFINITE LOSSES because they expect to make profit on the possibility the company goes bankrupt, can't others do the inverse on the possibility the company I don't know.. doesn't go bankrupt and gets a better strategy from the team that created what is now a $43bn market cap company (CHWY) that does exactly some of the things GME needs to do (digital revenue growth) maybe? I mean, I first bought in on that fundamental value thesis in the 30s and then upped my cost basis given the asymmetry of risk in the technical analysis as an obvious no-brainer momentum trade. The squeeze is just, as WSB people might say, tendies raining down from on high as an added bonus.
I get that you disagree on the fundamental viability of GME. Great. Isn't that what makes a market?
Regarding the consequences of a squeeze, in practice my expectation was maybe at worst some kind of ex-market settlement after liquidation of the funds with exposure to keep things nice and orderly for the rest of the market. I mean, they handled the VW thing somehow right? I see now that I just underestimated elite hedge fund managers though--those guys are so hardcore (I'll explain why I think so a bit lower down).
If hedge fund people are so hardcore, how did the retail long side ever have a chance of winning this squeeze trade they're talking about?
Because it's an asymmetrical battle once you have short interest cornered. And the risk is also crazily asymmetrical in favor of the long side if short interest is what it is in GME. In fact, the hedge funds essentially cornered themselves without anyone even doing anything. They just dug themselves right in there. Kind of impressive really, in a weird way.
What does the short side need to cover? They need the price to be low, and they need to buy shares.
How does price move lower? You have to push share volume such that supply overwhelms demand and price therefore goes down (man, I knew econ 101 would come in handy someday).
But wait... if you have to sell shares to push the price down.. won't you just undo all your work when you have to buy it back to actually cover?
The trick is you have to push price down so hard, so fast, so unpredictably, that you SCARE OTHER PEOPLE into selling their shares too, because they're scared of taking losses. Their sales help push the price down for free! and then you scoop them up at discount price! Also, there are ways to make people scared other than price movement and fear of losses, when you get right down to it. So, you know, you just need to get really, really, really good at making people scared. Remember to add a line item to your budget to make sure you can really do it right.
On the other hand..
What does the long side need to do? They need to own as much of the shares as they can get their hands on. And then they need to hold on to them. They can't be weak hands either. They need to be hands that will hold even under the most intense heat of battle, and the immense pressure of mind-numbing fear... they need to be as if they were made of... diamond... (oh wow, maybe those WSB people kind of have a point here).
Why does this matter? Because at some point the sell side will eventually run out of shares to borrow. They simply won't be there, because they'll be safely tucked away in the long-side's accounts. Once you run out of shares to borrow and sell, you have no way to move the price anymore. You can't just drop a fat stack--excuse me, I mean suitcase (we're talking hedge fund money here after all)--of Benjamins on the ticker tape directly. Only shares. No more shares, no way to have any direct effect on the price whatsoever.
Ok, doesn't that just mean trading stops? Can't you just out-wait the long side then?
Well, you could.. until someone on the long side puts 1 share up on a 69420 ask, and an even crazier person actually buys at that price on the last tick on a Friday. Let's just say it gets really bad at that point.
Ok.. but how do the retail people actually get paid?
Well, to be quite honest, it's entirely up to each of them individually. You've seen the volumes being thrown around the past week+. I guarantee you every single retailer out there could have printed money multiple times trading that flow. If they choose to, and time it well. Or they could lose it all--this is the market. Some of them apparently seem to have some plan, or an implicit trust in certain individuals to help them know when to punch out. Maybe it works out, but maybe not. There will be financial casualties on the field for sure--this is the bare-knuckled capitalist jungle after all, remember? But everyone ponied up to the table with their own money somehow, so they all get to play in the big leagues just like everyone else. In theory, anyway.
And now, Probably the #1 question I've been asked on all of these posts has been: So what happens next? Do we get the infinity squeeze? Do the hedge funds go down?
Great questions. I don't know. No one does. That's what I've said every time, but I get that's a frustrating answer, so I'll write a bit more and speculate further. Please again understand these are my opinions with a degree of speculation I wouldn't normally put in a post.

The Market and the Economy. Main Street, Wall Street, and Washington

The pandemic has hurt so many people that it's hard to comprehend. Honestly, I don't even pretend to be able to. I have been crazy fortunate enough to almost not be affected at all. Honestly, it is a little unnerving to me how great the disconnect is between people who are doing fine (or better than fine, looking at my IRA) versus the people who are on the opposite side of the ever-widening divide that, let's be honest, has been growing wider since long before the pandemic.
People on the other side--who have been told they cannot work even if they want to, who wonder if congress will get it together to at least keep them from getting thrown out of their house if they have to keep taking one for the team for the good of all, are wondering if they're even living in the same reality.
Because all they see on the news each day is that the stock market is at record highs, or some amazing tech stocks have 10x'd in the last 6 months. How can that be happening during a pandemic? Because The Market is not The Economy. The Market looks forward to that brighter future that Economy types just need to wait for. Don't worry--it'll be here sometime before the end of the year. We think. We're making money on that assumption right now, anyway. Oh, by the way, if you're in The Market, you get to get richer as a minor, unearned side-effect of the solutions our governments have come up with to fight the pandemic.
Wow. That sounds amazing. How do I get to part of that world?
Retail fintech, baby. Physical assets like real estate might be a bit out of reach at the moment, but stocks will do. I can even buy fractional shares of BRK/A LOL.
Finally, I can trade for my own slice of heaven, watching that balance go up (and up--go stonks!!). Now I too get to dream the dream. I get to feel connected to that mythical world, The Market, rather than being stuck in the plain old Economy. Sure, I might blow up my account, but that's because it's the jungle. Bare-knuckled, big league capitalism going on right here, and at least I get to show up an put my shares on the table with everyone else. At least I'm playing the same game. Everyone has to start somewhere--at least now I get to start, even if I have to learn my lesson by zeroing my account a few times. I've basically had to deal with what felt like my life zeroing out a few times before. This is number on a screen going to 0 is nothing.
Laugh or cry, right? I'll post my losses on WSB and at least get some laughs.
Geez, some of the people here are making bank. I better learn from them and see if they'll let me in on their trades. Wow... this actually might work. I don't understand yet, but I trust these guys telling me to hold onto this crazy trade. I don't understand it, but all the memes say it's going to be big.
...WOW... I can pay off my credit card with this number. Do I punch out now? No? Hold?... Ok, getting nervous watching the number go down but I trust you freaks. We're still in the jungle, but at least I'm in with with my posse now. Market open tomorrow--we ride the rocket baby! And if it goes down, at least I'm going down with my crew. At least if that happens the memes will be so hilarious I'll forget to cry.
Wow.. I can't believe it... we might actually pull this off. Laugh at us now, "pros"!
We're in The Market now, and Market rules tell us what is going to happen. We're getting all that hedge fund money Right? Right?
Maybe.
First, I say maybe because nothing is ever guaranteed until it clears. Secondly, because the rules of The Market are not as perfectly enforced as we would like to assume. We are also finding out they may not be perfectly fair. The Market most experts are willing to talk about is really more like the ideal The Market is supposed to be. This is the version of the market I make my trading decisions in. However, the Real Market gets strange and unpredictable at the edges, when things are taken to extremes, or rules are pushed beyond the breaking point, or some of the mechanics deep in the guts of the Real Market get stretched. GME ticks basically all of those boxes, which is why so many people are getting nervous (aside from the crazy money they might lose). It's also important to remember that the sheer amount of money flowing through the market has distorting power unto itself. Because it's money, and people really, really, really like their money--especially when they're used to having a lot of it, and rules involving that kind of money tend to look more... flexible, shall we say.
Ok, back to GME. If this situation with GME is allowed to play out to its conclusion in The Market, we'll see what happens. I think all the long-side people get the chance to be paid (what, I'm not sure--and remember, you have to actually sell your position at some point or it's all still just numbers on your screen), but no one knows for certain.
But this might legitimately get so big that it spills out of The Market and back into The Economy.
Geez, and here I thought the point of all of this was so that we all get to make so much money we wouldn't ever have to think and worry about that thing again.
Unfortunately, while he's kind of a buzzkill, Thomas Petterfy has a point. This could be a serious problem.
It might blow out The Market, which will definitely crap on The Economy, which as we all know from hard experience, will seriously crush Main Street.
If it's that big a deal, we may even need Washington to be involved. Once that happens, who knows what to expect.. this kind of scenario being possible is why I've been saying I have no idea how this ends, and no one else does either.
How did we end up in this ridiculous situation? From GAMESTOP?? And it's not Retail's fault the situation is what it is.. why is everyone telling US that we need to back down to save The Market?? What about the short-side hedge funds that slammed that risk into the system to begin with?? We're just playing by the rules of The Market!!
Well, here are my thoughts, opinions, and some even further speculation... This may be total fantasy land stuff here, but since I keep getting asked I'll share anyway. Just keep that disclaimer in mind.

A Study in Big Finance Power Moves: If you owe the bank $10,000, it's your problem...

What happens when you owe money you have no way to pay back? It's a scary question to have to face personally. Still, on balance and on average, if you're fortunate enough to have access to credit the borrowing is a risk that is worth taking (especially if you're reasonably careful). Lenders can take a risk loaning you money, you take a risk by borrowing in order to do something now that you would otherwise have had to wait a long time or maybe would never have realistically been able to do otherwise. Sometimes it doesn't work out. Sometimes it's due to reasons totally beyond your control. In any case, if you find yourself there you have no choice but to dust yourself off, pick yourself up as best as you can, and try to move on and rebuild. A lot of people had to learn that in 2008. Man that year really sucked.
Wall street learned their lessons too. Most learned what I think most of us would consider the right lessons--lessons about risk management, and the need to guard vigilantly against systemic risk, concentration of risk through excess concentration of leverage on common assets, etc. Many suspect that at least a few others may have learned an entirely different set of, shall we say, unhealthy lessons. Also, to try to be completely fair, maybe managing other peoples' money on 10x+ leverage comes with a kind of pressure that just clouds your judgement. I could actually, genuinely buy that. I know I make mistakes under pressure even when I'm trading risk capital I could totally lose with no real consequence. Whatever the motive, here's my read on what's happening:
First, remember that as much fun as WSB are making of the short-side hedge fund guys right now, those guys are smart. Scary smart. Keep that in mind.
Next, let's put ourselves in their shoes.
If you're a high-alpha hedge fund manager slinging trades on a $20bn 10x leveraged to 200bn portfolio, get caught in a bad situation, and are down mark-to-market several hundred million.. what do you do? Do you take your losses and try again next time? Hell no.
You're elite. You don't realize losses--you double down--you can still save this trade no sweat.
But what if that doesn't work out so well and you're in the hole >$2bn? Obvious double down. Need you ask? I'm net up on the rest of my positions (of course), and the momentum when this thing makes its mean reversion move will be so hot you can almost taste the alpha from here. Speaking of momentum, imagine the move if your friends on TV start hyping the story harder! Genius!
Ok, so that still didn't work... this is now a frigging 7 sigma departure from your modeled risk, and you're now locked into a situation that is about as close to mathematically impossible to escape as you can get in the real world, and quickly converging on infinite downside. Holy crap. The fund might be liquidated by your prime broker by tomorrow morning--and man, even the broker is freaking out. F'in Elon Musk and his twitter! You're cancelling your advance booking on his rocket ship to Mars first thing tomorrow... Ok, focus--this might legit impact your total annual return. You need a plan, and you know the smartest people on the planet, right? The masters of the universe! Awesome--they've even seen this kind of thing before and still have the playbook!! Of course! It's obvious now--you borrow a few more billion and double down again first thing in the morning. So simple. Sticky note that Mars trip cancellation so you don't forget.
Ok... so that didn't work? You even cashed in some pretty heavy chits too. Ah well, that was a long shot anyway. So where were you? Oh yeah.. if shenanigans don't work, skip to page 10...
...Which says, of course, to double down again. Anyone even keeping track anymore? Oh, S3 says it's $40bn and we're going parabolic? Man, that chart gives me goosebumps. All according to plan...
So what happens tomorrow? One possible outcome of PURE FANTASTIC SPECULATION...
End of the week--phew. Never though it'd come. Where are you at now?... Over $9000^\)!!! Wow. You did it boys, and as a bonus the memes will be so sweet.
^\)side note: add 8 zeros to the end...
Awesome--your problems have been solved. Because...
​
..
​
BOOM
​
Now it's EVERYONE's problem. Come at me, Chamath, THIS is REAL baller shit.
Now all you gotta do is make all the hysterical retirees watching their IRAs hanging in the balance blame those WSB kids. Hahaha. Boomers, amirite? hate when those kids step on their law--I mean IRAs. GG guys, keep you memes. THAT is how it's done.
Ok, but seriously, I hope that's not how it ends. I guess we just take it day by day at this point.
Apologies for the length. Good luck in the market!
Also, apologies in advance for formatting, spelling, and grammatical errors. I was typing this thing in between doing all kinds of other things for most of the day.
Edit getting a bunch of questions on if it's possible the hedge funds are finding ways to cover in spite of my assumptions. Of course. I'm a retail guy trying to read the charts and price action. I don't have any special tools like the pros may have.