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Comment by jakelazaroff | Hacker News Reader

CNBC reported that Melvin Capital closed on their GameStop position [1]. So it's basically over, right? Or is there more to it?

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/27/hedge-fund-targeted-by-reddi...

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So, from what I understand (I did not do the maths myself), despite Gamestop being the most traded stock right now, not enough has moved in the premarket for Melvin Capital to actually close their position when they claimed they did. It seems a very dubious claim.

There is no evidence that is true, and short interest is still above 130% so it sounds like a lie to discourage additional buying of gme

Where do you determine short interest figures for a stock?

Are they accurate to the hour? My impression was that this information wasn't reported at a regular cadence, but I have no idea.

Buy a dataset, get it from your broker or use a bloomberg terminal. The info available to most retail traders in their stock app of choice (and certainly true for RH) is pretty abysmal

I suspect that RH drastically limiting the information available to their users is all designed to limit analysis and make people feel more confident that they fully understand everything they are doing. People trade more when they feel more confident.

they most likely sold the position from melvin capital to another entity to hold the risk. that way melvin capital can say "oh yeah we caved in haha reddit wins" to try and calm the market, but I would wager that some private citadel fund is now about to be forced to fellate the reddit call pump

Other shorts may well have moved in. Shorting at 3$ was optimistic. Shorting at $300 is less so.

Some people are saying that Melvin Capital lied. That seems unlikely: my guess is that you'd go to jail for a long time if you lied about your purchases to manipulate the market on such a grand scale.

Lie or go bankrupt? Hard choice.

Its cute that you think anyone in the cozy wall street / hedge fund family would go to jail for lying.

Bernie Madoff, Conrad Black, Martha Stewart

Even then, it’s more of a “jail” than a jail.

I don't know that much about it. Martha Stewart went to a minimum security prison for female inmates, and honestly, she's exactly the type of criminal that belongs in minimum security. The judge recommended they send her to her first choice prison (in Danbury) but for some reason they couldn't and they sent her to a prison she didn't want. I'm not really seeing favoritism here. She was investigated for insider trading, but those charges got dismissed and she was ultimately just convicted for lying.

Did anyone end up in jail for causing the global financial crisis? Or, say, for manipulation of the interbank lending rate?

Isn't it more likely the company will go bankrupt and the traders will 'only' have their most recent £10M bonus to fall back on?

They did not lie, they just neglected to disclose how much of their shorts were closed.

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