Lolol imagine thinking the stock price is related in any way to a company's real value.

Short-sellers disproportionately help uninformed retail investors. What happens without active short-sellers is that dumb retail tends to get crowded into overpriced stocks, indexes are overindexed on overpriced stocks. Short-sellers drive down the prices of overpriced stocks to an equilibrium (while effectively funneling the demand towards underpriced stocks) so that retail investors who on average make "random" choices are less likely to pay a premium even if they have no discernible stock picking skills. They also help with the discovery of frauds and disincentivize financial frauds more generally.

Some additional transparency would help but full transparency in real time isn't feasible.

Why would it level the playing field? The most likely outcome would be to restrict the investment options for the retail. SEC is overwhelmingly concerned about the retail losing money that they can't afford to lose - once upon a time, the playing field was a lot more level and the retail kept getting defrauded and that's why we have all these rules and restrictions.

Diamond hands

Alternatively imagine believing this ****

Sure, but I think there should be limits. Shorting 140% (or even 30%) of a stock is insane and should be illegal.
Short positions should not be able to destroy companies outright.


A limit on the short positions would be enough.

This isn't a thing - generally speaking shorting doesn't destroy companies and has no material impact on the operations of a business. And think of it from the perspective of the short-seller - they can short any stock, why would they choose an otherwise great undervalued company? They don't - they target companies that they strongly believe is overvalued relative to their actual value.

They are so efficient that :
Bonds are the greatest bubble in history
Market all time high
Real estate still crazy high
World drowning in debts due a lot by bailing the financials out .

Around 20% on the Russell 3000 index are zombies companies
2008 crisis = bail out
2000 dot-com bubble
Etc ...

You give way too much credit about how short seller are protecting the little guy .
They couldn’t care less about them ....

If they would of care , no complains from Wall Street would of been against the small retailers .
They have the power and they don’t want it to share it , be equally fair .

This is kind of my point - short-sellers being vilified and being driven out of business lead to a financial market bubble. This is how things work. The reason why investors invest with short-sellers is because short-sellers (whether long-short or not) promise less correlated returns, not because they promise high absolute returns. During bubbles, people who care about things like that are systematically removed from positions of power across all intermediaries because their preferred strategies appear to consistently underperform and people stop caring about hypotheticals like how a given strategy would perform across an entire market cycle.

The point isn't that short-sellers are trying to protect the little guy, but that having them remain a significant part of the ecosystem helps the little guy get better prices on their random purchases.

Coulda fooled me when the shorts were all over Tesla from everything like fake news pieces to full on market manipulation.
If that wasn't an attempt to destroy the company then you and I have a very different definition of what 'destroy' means in his context.

Shorts want the stock to go to zero. That's where they make the most money.
A company whose stock goes to zero is dead.

The point candy bar I think is :
Lot of hedges funds do collaborate sometimes to kill a business when in trouble , regardless if the business is viable or not , possibly costing multiples job losses ( hence the little guy pay by losing his job) .
But when hedge funds are the target by a similar strategy , they complain and they get saved by a changed of the rules ( can’t buy GameStop anymore for example and so the little investors loses ) or they get bailed out ( again little guy pays for them by having a bigger government debt ).

That is the problem .

When you seat at the poker table , if a rule need to be changed it’s fine .
But AFTER the hand is facking over , not in the middle of it ffs ....
They should of never intervene in the market before The situation was over....

Not only is it possible but I think it's likely. There's a whole industry built around gaming and hacking reddit, from making authentic looking accounts to buying upvotes and getting posts to the top. See this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SAk...ature=youtu.be

I think this type of thing has been going on for a long time in WSB, it just so happens that all the conditions were right for GME and it blew up.

Candybar is saying a lot of smart, albeit unpopular, things here IMO.

Playing Chicken: Three Interesting Takes on the Redditors Versus Predators Comedy/Tragedy/Farce - Concluding With My Comment

I lifted the following comments from a recent Slashdot post.

(1.) >It won't go to 1000, GME would have to be worth 50 billion.

Gamestop, the company isn't worth it, but GME, the stock can certainly be worth more, at least for a while.

The stock price doesn't currently reflect anything to do with Gamestop's business. It's based on the fact that the shorts will at some point have to buy GME to replace the shares they borrowed. Shorts aren't like options - there's no fixed expiration date. GME is still massively shorted (still over 120% of float). Those holding short positions are having to put up margin calls, basically they have to have funds in their accounts worth 125% (or more) of the current value of their shorted shares. So, while they don't directly lose money until they close out the position (well, they're also paying interest on the borrowed shares, so that is an ongoing cost), there are huge amounts of money they have to come up with so it can just sit there. So right now it's a waiting and betting game to see who flinches first - the longer the redditters hold out, the more it hurts the shorts.

(2.) Yes, exactly. That is what so many people covering this topic don't seem to understand. They are making judgements and giving suggestions (like Cramer's "take the home run" advice) that are applicable to a rational actor trying to act in their own self interest (ie: profit). That's not (mostly) who these people are. They would be considered irrational actors (though their actions are actually quite rational....just with a different endgame in mind). The majority aren't looking to cash out. They say they will either ride the stock to zero or pass it to their kids in their will. The number one goal here is to punish the shorts, and they just want to "be a part of history" (as I've heard many of them say).

And since their goal is to punish the shorts, this is where all of this advice falls flat on it's face. If they cash out now, then the shorts will recover and it will have been a failure. The longer they can hold the line (and continue sucking up as many shares as they can as the come available), then the longer it will take to squeeze the shorts. Even if the shorts try to ride it out, those shorts have to pay an ongoing fee for shorting (when you short a stock, you are actually selling a stock you borrowed, so you have to pay a fee to the person you borrowed the stock from). So the longer this rides out, the longer the shorts money is tied up in the short and the more the fees will mount up.

(3.) People are acting like the GME rally was a "meme", as though there was no basis for the rally that happened here. That is incorrect.

The fact is that GME was _extremely_ over-sold. That makes it a good buy. In fact, it was _so_ over-sold that by buying a _lot_ of it, and holding that lot of it, you could force the sellers to realize their mistake and exit their position -- at which point they owe you _more_ money. It was recognized as over sold, it was a planned purchase, it was executed, and it corrected the over-sold nature of the stock.

Stop there. I'm not going to degrees, I'm saying that GME _is now_ a good buy, but it was _certainly_ a good buy when it was over sold. It was also good for Gamestop -- they covered debt, they'll be able to keep going as a company for some time. AMC too -- they didn't spike, but their debt is absolved by the growth in their over-sold stock, and that makes them a more valuable company in the end.

Lets look at that last part. Other large investors felt strongly enough about the strength in the AMC gains that they used it to absolve AMC of their pandemic-induced debt. This is institutional traders, who supposedly know more than these meme-followers. The growth in these stocks is _justified_ and is supported by institutional traders.

The end result? A few companies that were going to go under have now been supported through the pandemic. Real companies, that people really interact with, that do provide value to the country.

So lets go back to the high valuation of gamestop right now. Absolutely, it's now "over valued." In fact, just about every stock in the stock market is over valued right now. Is it just going to fall out of the sky, then? No. Again, every stock is over valued. There are holders of this stock that bought it because they like Gamestop. My friend said his family practically lived there for years (him and kids). Gamestop is over valued, just like everything else in the market. (Tesla -- why aren't they halting trading on Tesla?)

The reason for this is that people have money, and they don't know what to do with it. Previously they were putting it into savings accounts. (Through high school, "7% _compounding_ interest! You should put your money in a savings account and save for retirement!" Oh, that interest is now 0.05%... damn. The stock market! We'll put it into the stock market!) Savings accounts aren't viable, and most people realize that, so all the money that people are just sitting on is being used to buy up stock. As a result, every company's stock is over-valued; as a result, many, many stocks are inflated beyond reason; as a result, all the "fundamentals" that you're hearing about no longer apply to the stock market. People are just buying because they don't have anything better to do with their money. If it goes up, great. If it doesn't, well they weren't doing anything with it anyway. People are buying the indexes (SPY, XLK, QCLN, TAN, PBW) because it's "easy" and/or because they like what it represents (clean energy! I'll buy into that!). Because people are buying, it keeps going up. It's a meme. "Buy the market!"

That's not to say these savings-accounters are wrong -- they're putting there money 1. where they might get something out of it (as opposed to where they _won't_ get something out of it), 2. where it might help the world (clean energy!), 3. in the relatively "safe" indexes.

The absolute result is everything in the indexes is growing just because people "meme"ed it. The current market is a meme. It will crash if anyone finds something better to do with their money than put it in the stock market like a savings account, because "Hey stock market!" isn't any longer the best option.

Hedge funds and institutional traders are just meme-followers.

My Comment

I remember in grade school (circa 1960's) us guys would play a stupid game called "Chicken" on the playground. You and another guy would stand about three feet apart and take turns throwing your pocket knife between the other guy's feet. The "winner" of this game was the guy who didn't "chicken out" first and walk away - before the next knife throw landed either in his foot or somewhere else ...

Seems like that is what's going on here - the WSB crowd and the hedge funds are playing chicken.

....................

SNL skewers the majority shareholder of Gamestop
pretty funny
btw: stocks should be pronounced "stonks"
it starts at 6:18 in the vid
the pic shows Marjorie Taylor Greene but that is just the first segment

I’m thinking why not just for fun , buy just 1 share as an heads or tails bets (50% to win) , shrug .
Seem more chance to win that bet with GameStop than flipping a coin .

idk how anyone can watch SNL or any late night tv show

those forced laugh tracks are hands down the worst

Pretty horrible 1st level "analysis" actually, and it's not even funny. Classic SNL.

what makes it worse is they have a team of like 8 writers who work on this for days..

Reading WSB right now actually feels like a cult.

I feel like there are 2 groups of people on WSB right now.

(1) the group manipulating others into just holding onto the stock forever who are going to be the ones making the money.

(2) the group buying that manipulation and holding forever that will be the bagholders at the end losing money.

I also seriously don't really understand why all these people suddenly care about hedge funds that much that they are willing to risk tens of 1000s of dollars for it. The impact these hedge funds have on the average person is not that important. Does it suck that they use dirty tactics to make money? Sure, but dirty tactics are not unique to hedge funds or wall street or whatever.

I don't particularly like these powerful hedge funds and they truly have may more power than they provide value, but do they deserve this degree of vilification from average every day people? I think they are directing their anger in the wrong direction.


I think the actual reality is that a lot of people made a few 1000 or 10000s of dollars and have this idea that if they hold they could make 100.000s or 1.000.000s, but are buying into the cult mindset and not admitting that. And they will probably fail and end up losing money.

Human's are prone to cults

It's in our nature

Just look at every single powerful organisation in the world

always very culty

Anyone care to speculate on how the referral and stock promotion by discount online platform brokers like Robinhood plays or effects this situation?
I've already posted a theory, i don't believe it - just a possibility, in the 2021 trading thread so i won't repeat it.
Anyway it's a lot of free cheap stocks given away/ possibly borrowed by these platforms from hedge funds like Blackrock. As i remember it GME was one of the most common stocks people would get for free back in 2019 and early 2020.

So is there anyway to know what the current short position is? Melvin publicly states last Tuesday they have closed out their short position, people on the internet seem to be pretty confident they are essentially lying and GME still has 100%+ short positions.

Is there anyway to actually know? Is it possible most short positions have been closed and the entire "movement" or whatever you want to call it is fighting, well, no one at this point?

One thing it you all are missing, other than the mechanics of the short squeeze eloquently laid out above, is the psychology and identity of the original wallstreetbets member. Like bane in Batman, we were raised in that darkness, we cut our teeth losing thousands, for many hundreds of thousands, gambling on risky options plays that expire THE VERY NEXT DAY. We are crazy, we don’t care if we lose our crappy little $1500 dollars of 5 GameStop shares because that’s all that we were allowed to buy . The Stonk market has made straight up Monopoly money post Feb COVID crash. Most of that is from retail investors NOT hedge funds. The retail investor fueled this market rally, and now the end game of monopoly is here, people have their hotels bought, after all there’s only so many allowed in the game. And now you will start to see the BIG moves when both sides double down and put all their chips in the middle.

Mr. sideline:

Per this: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/29/game...this-year.html

CNBC article, "GameStop remained the most-shorted name in the market as short interest as a percentage of shares available for trading stands at 113.31%, S3 said."

Which means nothing. They could have had 100 positions and just opened one more with 1 shorted share and then closed that single one...and then came out with "we have closed our position".
Putting it out on national TV also makes no sense. Why would you tell everyone on TV? What's the point? The investors in Melvin don't need TV for this info and no one else cares.


But it makes a lot of sense if you want to convey the impression to WSB that "Haha, you won, gg...now go and be nice and sell all your shares and move on (so that we can really cover all our positions)"

They have not made their short position(s) public.

Since they are pulling money left and right out of their longs...no, they haven't covered, yet.

Also think of the new FUD they have placed in the media yesterday: "if this goes on it will destroy the market!"

Think about it: If they have, as they claim, covered their short position already: where exactly is the threat to the market, hm?