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Comment by SpicyLemonZest | Hacker News Reader

Why would next week in particular be a bloodbath for the shorts? I think you're falling victim to a sliding timeline here - when I asked people up until late Wednesday, they consistently said that today was the bloodbath day.

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Because the short ratio is still over 100%. With the clearing house catching up on the settling trades over the weekend, the counterparty risk goes down, allowing the trading platforms to lift the trade restriction, and allowing hordes of WSB to continue to bid up GME. Other moneys will smell blood and join in as they have seen how well GME held up today despite the restricted trades.

That's just the story of any bubble. Lots of people will bid it up because they expect other people to join in, until at some point they stop believing others will join in. I can't disprove it, because bubbles do of course happen, but that doesn't say much about how long this particular one will continue.

I guess what I'd encourage you to do is write some notes for yourself about exactly what you expect will happen, so that when the justifications for the bubble change again you'll be able to notice and hopefully get out in time.

Was today not a bloodbath? GME closed Thursday at $193.60 and closed today at $325. That's an absolutely murderous day for a short.

It's hard to imagine anyone's holding a short position at this point without being prepared to tolerate at least a couple days of inflated prices. Anyone expecting a "normal" short would have bailed out on Tuesday.

Unironically, this feels more and more like QAnon. It doesn't matter that the bloodbath didn't happen when Q said it would, because what Q actually meant was 3 weeks from now, except in this case Q is Martin Shkreli or any of the other hundreds of hedge fund managers hanging out on WSB, stirring the pot while laughing all the way to the bank.

So as someone involved in this trade for the lulz, I had the exact same thought today, though you could probably have framed it a little less... sarcastically.

I couldn't help but notice the "this Friday is the day", "no wait this Monday", "no wait..." evolving narrative has felt an awful lot like folks dealing with cognitive dissonance. The parallel to qanon ("Trump will take over before the inauguration", "no wait during", "no wait March 4th"...) is definitely there.

Now I absolutely don't believe there's any nefarious orchestration behind the scenes. I think it's straight up groupthink.

But I'm up a decent amount on the trade so far and this realization absolutely made me rethink my exit strategy.

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