Hedgefunds are real Robinhood customers buying their order flow. They go belly up Robinhood looses their actual source of income plus Robinhood lent them a ton of stock to short so they are on the hook too.
Market makers buy order flow. Hedge funds don't. The only major hedge fund affiliated with a market maker is Citadel.
Melvin and Citron placing shorting GME is an anomaly in the hedge fund world. Most institutional short views are expressed through options and structured products. (Market makers convert those options into shorts, the same way they convert calls into stock purchases.)
Market makers are making tonnes of money on this. It's the low-information non-directional trading their models are built for. (Source: former options market maker. My former colleagues are making annual targets in a week.)
Some hedge funds are getting screwed. But that is mostly over. Few funds' risk tolerances let them extend a 10x loss on an outright short. With respect to their puts, their maximum loss is the premium. That's generally baked into the risk model ex ante.
The only sophisticated parties holding the bag are brokers. Margin loans at risk. Uncovered options sales at risk. Most significantly, when the scheme inevitably crashes, almost-inevitable class-action lawsuits from clients claiming to have been misled by their interfaces.
Aren't these market makers sitting on a ton of stock to cover call positions?
They may have picked up a lot of pennies these last two weeks, but the bulldozer is getting bigger and faster. This is a truly unprecedented situation and I doubt they have confidence that their models can handle it.
> Aren't these market makers sitting on a ton of stock to cover call positions?
The whole purpose of delta hedging is to make them immune to the first-order effects of market moves. The first-order derivative of the value of everything they hold with respect to price moves in any one stock is constantly kept near zero.
In the old days, many options traders would put off hedging their books until near the closing bell. Smart equities traders would watch the options market to see which way the traders would be rushing to hedge in the cash equities market. These days, there are systems that automatically hedge out the positions throughout the day.
How many shares of Melvin Capital were bought by Citadel when they injected $2.75B? Is there a way to know how exposed they are?
Isn't there a conflict of interest in them floating a hedge fund losing money due to flow orders they are buying (or, potentially, not buying anymore)?