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Comment by cccc4all | Hacker News Reader

Time in the market is more important than timing the market, is a common investment advice.

Current GME situation is not investing, it's short term speculation and gambling and ideological tussle and class fragmentation thrown in. All investing strategies and tactics are thrown out the window.

The billionaire vulture short sellers got careless and lazy by shorting 140% of stock. Then, they got caught with their pants down with naked shorts and now squealing to everyone to bail them out. They could have just ate the losses, but they decided to pull all the dirty tricks and shenanigans. It may or may not work.

The WSB crowd battling the billionaire vulture short sellers are out for more than gains.

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>but they decided to pull all the dirty tricks and shenanigans

like what?

>The WSB crowd battling the billionaire vulture short sellers are out for more than gains.

I'm personally skeptical of this. It's easy to say you're doing this with noble reasons on the way up, but it's hard to tell whether the people are serious, or they they're trying to ensure there's enough bagholders to sell into.

The Robinhood shenanigans that stopped people from buying GME and allowed selling GME. Melvin Capital claiming they got out of short positions, without any significant changes in short %. The entire financial media propaganda telling people to sell GME. etc.

I didn't say WSB crowd was acting with noble reasons, but they are acting with more than financial interests. If you've read recent WSB posts, lot of the emotional appeal is ideological and class fragmentation, than lolz gainz. And, very few people actually posts in forums, so you have to multiply the sentiment by thousands, if not millions.

The bottom line is the price of GME, it's still above $300. Which everyone knows and agrees is over valued. Why, especially after the turbulent week?

I am wondering the same.

Maybe everybody is kinda hoping for the short squeeze? WSB is to stick it to the man but the other market participants?

The stock is shorted above 100%. If the price goes up enough, maybe the shorters will be have to exit their position and then will be the one left bagholding?

It really depends at which price they started the short. $8, $20 $350 $450?

But the puzzle is that "retail" is only a third of the market. a lot of the after hour kept it above 300 on Thursday and on Friday, and that is not the John Q Public doing those trades, so the big fish seem to be in agreement that it might be worth a try to go for the squeeze?

>Melvin Capital claiming they got out of short positions, without any significant changes in short %.

That's not too strange. It's entirely possible for them to close their short position by doing a private sale to another hedge fund. I don't imagine it's too hard to find takers given how inflated GME is.

Don't they have to buy stock to exit the position? How do you sell a "short position" that is hemorrhaging money?

(genuinely curious, I'm learning about this to distract myself from covid-19)

You can offload it to someone else. Say you shorted 100 shares at $50, but the price later goes to $100. One way to exit the short is to buy 100 shares on the open market, taking a loss of $5000. You can also find someone who wants to short, pay them $10,000, and transfer the position to them. Now the short position is off your hands, and the other person effectively entered into a short position at $100. It's kind of like taking over a lease.

The WSB crowd complaining about the "ladder attack" (short selling the stocks between themselves at lower and lower prices to drive down the price), misinformation on CNBC, being prevented from being able to buy the stock on various broker (thus prevented from driving the price up and causing the gamma squeeze to cause the short squeeze) "it was supposed to be a free market and we can't trade as freely as the billionaires" which, fair complaint I guess.

nonsense

Is it illegal

It's only illegal if you're poor enough

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