Feels like a good day to watch The Wolf of Wall Sreet.
Feels like a good day to watch The Wolf of Wall Sreet.
A year ago, the person that started this detected a situation where GME was a company that didn't have long term prospects, wasn't losing money, but was still shorted to 140% of it's value. It's not supposed to be possible to go over 100% any more since 2008, by the way.
Because of the shorting, he deduced that hedge funds and other influential people in the financial system were planning to encourage GME to go bankrupt, thus getting their short shares forgiven, because a bankrupt company is written off as a loss by the actual share owner.
So the hedge funds' plan was to short shares at some price as much as they could get away with, then make the shares worthless by encouraging bankruptcy. Since the shares would then be written off, they would pocket all the money they took from selling the shares they borrowed to short. Nice racket.
What WSB did is make the price go in the opposite direction, which is important for a lot of reasons, but one huge one is that the risk of shorting is proportional to the reward. If the price of a shorted stock goes up, then the borrower (person doing the short) still has to return it to the owner. No matter how high the price goes.
So they realized if they drive the price WAY up, then the people who were doing the 140% shorts on a company they planned to drive out of business would get screwed by their own system.
Some of the folks on WSB are making money and lots of it, but many of them just want to see the whole unfair system burn. By exploiting this weakness, they're trying to force the government to reform the whole finance industry.
In this case, the important point is that a hedge fund with a 140% short position is more vulnerable to loss than a hedge fund with a 100% short position.
Sure, but only in the sense that a fund is also more vulnerable to loss at 80% short than 40% short. Nothing magic happens between 99% and 101% short.
This is fundamentally untrue.
Abusive naked shorting with the goal of driving down prices is illegal. >100% short interest doesn’t require naked shorting at all.
If person A borrows a stock from person B then sells it to person C, they can borrow the stock back from person C and sell it again. No naked short involved.
A better analogy to understand why short interest can rise above 100% is fractional reserve lending and the effect that it has on money supply.
Re-borrowing the same share does not make it a naked short.
In any case, the important limit here is that financial firms are not supposed to allow hedge funds or other entities to assume short positions for more stock than exists, because if it becomes necessary to execute the trades to resolve the shorts, that extra 40% will fail to deliver, because those shares don't exist.
The SEC actually keeps a list of trading companies with high rates of failure to deliver as a means of detecting naked shorting.
That's only true if you force all shorts to be covered at once without a chain of trades. That's not how it happens.
Person A covers their short by buying a share from Person B and returning to Person C. Person D then buys that share from Person C and returns to Person E to cover their short. That's 2 short shares covered with a single underlying share and no failure to deliver.
Yes, the SEC does track failure to deliver, but >100% short interest does not mean there is naked shorting nor does it imply there will be failure to deliver.
"Naked shorting is the illegal practice of short selling shares that have not been affirmatively determined to exist"
- https://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/nakedshorting.asp
> that extra 40% will fail to deliver, because those shares don't exist
This is not true because all shorts don't have to be covered simultaneously.
> The SEC actually keeps a list of trading companies with high rates of failure to deliver as a means of detecting naked shorting
Funnily enough, $GME had very high failure to deliver rates in December [0] but this is not necessarily due to the short interest.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l97ykd/the_...
Naive question: Why would that ever happen? Wouldn't this scenario just cost person C commissions with no opportunity for gain?
You might be asking instead about the following scenario, though, where a single share is borrowed and sold short multiple times:
Person A borrows from Person C and sells to Person B
Person D borrows from Person B and sells it to Person E
Well, the covering of the shorts doesn't have to happen in an atomic transaction; there are thousands to millions of trades of a single ticker every day. Just as a single share can create a chain of multiple shorts (borrows and sales), a single share can cover multiple shorts too through a chain of trades.
If you can’t do that then you at least have to get the cooperation of someone who does own the stock in sufficient quantities - and their interests are probably against yours since they, y’know, own the stock.
Banning recursive shorting would be a nightmarish enterprise, since each individual share would need to be tracked to see if it was already shorted. Banning naked shorts supposedly does enough to discourage the behavior. We may be seeing that to not be the case.
With all due respect, this is still speculative. We won't know the exact numbers for another week.
My summary above is rough, and it's based on most of the information I've read about the situation. As always, there are voices on both sides for every single fact.
Time will tell how this all falls out, but right now there are a lot of finance firms grinding their teeth, which is a victory in itself.
Also, apparently Gamestop itself used the gain in stock price to settle some debts by being able to issue more stock to meet demand at the higher price, thus getting a cash infusion.
False -- if you're going to spread information about financial nuances across this thread, you should look it up first. Go read the SEC filings for GME (SEC EDGAR is your friend), there has been no additional issuance since GME took off. Nor would it be realistically possible given the volatility.
I think now, the cat is out of the bag, and astroturfing a pump-and-dump on reddit/twitter/discord is going to be a pretty lucrative thing now for some entities, at least until there's some kind of regulatory action against it. Comments like this: "I'm trying to jump in but can you eli5 what a market order is please?" get translated to "Come eat my lunch please! I would like to give away my money."
They want to see the whole unfair system burn, which I totally get, but this is not how you make that happen. Regular people do have a lot of power over our financial system, but when they try to exercise it like this... it's difficult to watch. So many people are going to eat shit on this. They'll be left holding the bag and wondering why everyone else on Wall Street got so rich off their backs.
If you're reading this and you think you might be sticking it to the hedge funds by buying in: there are plenty -- PLENTY -- of hedge funds who are willing to sell you GME at $350 per share.
I recommend “Margin Call”. Though I felt it overbalanced on the human drama it nicely complemented The Big Short.