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Comment by andjd | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a classic pump-and-dump scheme to me. The twist is that instead of claiming that the target company is going to start doing way better, they're claiming that the upside comes from hedge funds over-shorting the stock.

The people who are going to make a lot off this are the people who sell before the stock crashes. If those people were also suggesting others buy the stock on reddit, they may be criminally liable for securities fraud.

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There's a critical difference though: The amount of stock sold short is externally verifiable -- and it's still more than the available stock.

Where is this information available?

For NASDAQ, I think they publish the info daily on their website. But GME is NYSE, they publish semi-monthly and you can pay for it: https://www.nyse.com/market-data/reference/nyse-group-short-...

There may be other sources available, I didn't know this either so this is what I've found so far.

I think it's potentially more interesting than that.

It's hard to get figures to back up any speculation, of course... but it seems like this is at least somewhat a short squeeze. And it's potentially not just a bunch of gambling where people are gonna lose the farm...

The righteous narrative, for however much you might believe it, is that a significant portion of traders all basically agreed to each take on a small degree of risk in order to prove a point. People going big in, and not using the right instruments to ahem hedge their losses, are certainly gambling, but the proportion of these is not really clear.

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