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Have you been in the presence of a large community before? People turn their brains off in large groups.

It's even harder when it turns into a crowd and people are cheering on whatever is happening. Especially if there's moderation removing any messages of dissent.

Add in that short interest data is either not timely from the every two weeks official report, or incomplete/of unknown accuracy from the third party reports. And that anyway, it doesn't have any indication of what price the shorts sold for, and it's easy to see how people saw 130% short interest a few weeks ago and turned it into a squeeze, and see 130% short interest at the end of last week, and it's not squeezing anymore. Shorts @ $20 got out (at a high cost), and new shorts @ $300 got in, so the reportable short interest is the same, but the new shorts are probably getting out soon at a high profit.

From my perspective, one of my friends daily posts idiotic, factless garbage in our discord. He doesn't trade stocks but reads Reddit religiously. He constantly says he has no investment in either side but what do I think about (Citadel blackmailing Robinhood or some such garbage). I am thoroughly convinced that if he weren't currently jobless and lacking bonus money, he would've bought GME at 300, thinking it was going to the moon.

I think the core issue is, there is a significant number of people who only get their news from what is upvoted on Reddit, and what is upvoted on Reddit not only has no correlation with actuality, factuality, or reality, it also follows a lot of really nasty biases due to the upvote system. For example, another chat I'm in with a lot of Europeans had this one Portuguese guy last March posting daily fear mongering about the US burning down from Covid. I finally figured out after a week of it that all his headlines were coming from the Covid subreddit. I went and looked, the top 80 stories were all US based. No mention of Italy, Spain, UK, or any other European countries who were having similar rates at the time. I'm not convinced this guy even realized Covid existed in Europe at the time.

The moral of the story is, if you're going to try to form an opinion on something you know nothing about, you NEED to consider at least 2 different positions, and a lot of these people who fell into the conspiracy trap only considered 1. (And yes, even though Reddit is an aggregator, it is just 1 source).

> we don't know exactly by who yet, but it's abundantly clear that all these people were lied to

We definitely know who lied to most of these people: themselves. They let themselves get swept away in a tide of rocket emoji and never stopped to think about (or cared to learn about) the mechanics of the trading situation. Sure there are a few exceptions (this /u/deepfuckingvalue seems to know what he's doing, several others too), but I'd wager that 99% of the 6 million new subscribers were either seeing red with "fuck Wall Street" fury or green with greed.

Because we're genuinely curious how such a large and seemingly well-connected community could have been so mind-bogglingly wrong about something ("how short trading works") that should have been an unambiguous truth.

Now do HN’s collective beliefs about startups...

what is the truth though? As someone who only knows about stocks from 'big short' film and 5min video on youtube and wsb thread. I genuinely curious what are the ways this could play out.

is there a deadline on short sellers to close their positions? what is reasonable limit for the stock to go to? what happens if hypothetically nobody of wsb would sell their stocks?

So, a short squeeze is a real thing. The stock going up means that the people holding an underwater short need to rush to buy to close their positions before they go farther underwater. This then makes the stock go up faster. That's indeed what happened last week.

But you don't need to buy back all the stock, just enough such that you have enough flexibility to hold the stock across the inevitable peak and drop. In a consumer brokerage, this generally takes the form of a "margin call" and the brokerage will often buy stock for you out of your margin so they don't get caught holding the bag, and eventually can seize your whole portfolio to make themselves whole (the regulations there get complicated and I'm not expert). It's an absolute thing, and you lose all your money. But that's not how it works for a hedge fund, the nature of which is to have access to financing regular people don't. They can just cut a deal with bigger players to get through, and that's how Melvin seems to have managed this.

To be clear: Melvin made an outrageously inappropriate bet, got caught, and lots a ton of money. But they're out now and the story is over. Now GME is just a bubble like any other bubble, fed by naive investors believing it will go up when it won't.

As far as "what happens if WSB doesn't sell?", the answer is nothing. WSB doesn't hold the full capitalization of GME. There are plenty of other shares out there being traded, and the price of those trades is what you see on the ticker.

> But they're out now and the story is over

some say they are, some say they aren't. Is this in fact true?

> WSB doesn't hold the full capitalization of GME

does anybody know how much does wsb hold approximately? very rough number would still be interesting to know.

It's hard to say because every source I can find shows institutional ownership is 120-160% and I don't know how it's possible to own more than 100% of a thing. I suppose that could all be the short positions leading up to the recent drama.

Stock creation of this form is not entirely unlike the money creation that happens with fractional reserve banking. A short squeeze is crudely analogous to a bank run with that mental model.

(I have no market position on any individual stocks... because I don't consider myself sufficiently well-educated to do it. So take that grain of salt as you see fit).

Every short share creates a long share.

If a stock is 30% shorted, that means there are 130% of shares in circulation. (And 30% negative shares.)

If a stock is 130% shorted, that means there are 230% of shares in circulation. (And 130% negative shares.)

If your numbers are correct, then institutional investors would own just a bit over half of GME.

> some say they are, some say they aren't. Is this in fact true?

The ones which said they are out are out. There isn't actually any evidence that they stayed in. There is a lot of frenetic speculation on reddit that they're still in, which is mostly the result of redditors cargo culting bad "game theory" to support their own priors that hedge funds will always lie no matter what. I have written many comments about this in the past couple of days; suffice it to say that these conspiracy theories are based in basic trading illiteracy and misunderstood jargon, mixed with a heavy dose of emotional investment.

On the other hand, there is good evidence they actually closed out when they said they did: the hedge funds getting burned when GME was at $50 and $100 simply wouldn't exist anymore when GME hit $300, $400 or $500. They would have been margin called and it would have been game over.

And finally - yes, some funds are short GME right now. But that's not because they were short at $4.5, it's because the current price is dissociated from reality and all the smart money wants to short the peak.

There's not a single "deadline", each short seller has their own contract with their own terms and conditions.

So since it's a rotating cast of characters, it is entirely possible that the very early short position holders have all taken their lumps, and the current short sellers sold their borrowed shares for $100's of dollars each, and now have the ability to hold on for quite some time.

Sure and also the short options themselves have a price tag. That cannot be very good for an option against a stock in that state.

Also I think this is being over-analyzed. Reading the comments the majority of users there don't claim they really know all the details. To me this is a protest against hedge funds.

Ironically, in their attempt to protest hedge funds, they have probably handed over large amounts of money to hedge funds. Sure, the funds that got slammed by the short squeeze were hurt, but as more redditors started piling in to buy shares and buy options, other hedge funds took advantage of the situation. Who do the WSB crowd think is selling them shares or call options at this point?

There is no specific deadline for short sellers, only interest payments and margin maintenance requirements. If a short seller fails to meet margin maintenance requirements, they will have to close the position or deposit more assets as collateral within a few days or their brokerage will take action for them. This is the classic short-squeeze scenario -- short sellers are forced to close the position to meet margin requirements, and in doing so they drive up the price of the stock and trigger margin calls for more short sellers.

Eventually Gamestop could be forced to issue more shares to improve the liquidity of their stock, and wsb would be less relevant.

My guess is that in a week or two we will be hearing sob stories from people who bought GME at the peak thinking the price would go higher. At this point the wsb crowd is lining the pockets of hedge funds who are taking advantage of the situation -- unsophisticated investors trying to profit from a short squeeze are an easy target.

Short sellers have two days to borrow and deliver shares, and if they don't do that, they can be subject to a buy-in (I think 3 days later) for failure to deliver. They don't really manage that back office stuff themselves; their prime brokers do.

Shorts also have to pay a large amount of interest to remain short, because they are borrowing the shares that they sell. Indicatively, I see the short rate at around 12.5% annually. This is not terribly high. You can look at the short rate as a quick-and-dirty, but more granular across time, proxy for short interest.

People are acting like GME is the only stock that has ever short squeezed. TSLA has squeezed repeatedly and its valuations have stayed high despite the company not turning a profit ex regulatory credits. We've already exceeded "reasonable" for GME so it's all a question of price action at this point. The main factor that makes GME's squeeze such a huge deal is that it was driven by a self-deprecating crowd of people sharing thoughts publicly, rather than some famous billionaire steering the money of several other famous billionaires.

There's no law that says every trade has to be justified on a fundamental basis. Some people trade technicals. Others trade sentiment. Still others trade volatility. The price is the price. If BTC can go to 30k then GME can go to 1k.

Another interesting factor is that, if short-sellers were reluctant to cover at $4, then there are bound to be many firms that are short stock (or long puts) here around $100. As long as there are shorts out there, it can squeeze again from shorts covering or market-makers hedging gamma. If nobody from WSB sells, then it's a question of the rest of the market participants (computers, market-makers, hedge funds, retail, you name it) pushing around the spot price. IMO it's a very interesting situation. We don't get FTD and short interest data very often -- bimonthly and on a lag -- so there's a lot of uncertainty. I share your genuine curiosity.

I see it differently. The GME situation highlighted disparities in market access and shed light upon loopholes in short-selling regulations (including the bona-fide market-maker exemption) that allow market participants to sell delta that they can't find.

I also think the caveat of using the epithet "pump and dump" is that you should have some evidence that the initial information was false or misleading. As it turns out, Melvin was extremely short, as were others, and everyone who got involved prior to the squeeze had ample opportunity to make money. Not every hyped name that rallies immensely and then sells off aggressively is a "pump and dump." The stock is still up 20x in a year.

> Even now I'm still seeing people screaming about "hold the line" and inserting endless rocket emojis

I've been saying of WSB since before this debacle exploded, these are bots. The same bots that have run many other meme-y subreddits like r/the_donald, the same bots that are kingmakers on twitch. Spamming emoji-laden slogans as non-sequitur replies to comments nested 3 layers deep is a telltale sign.

I can't be the only one who sees this? Maybe the whole internet is bots. Maybe I'm the only non-bot.

You sure talk in certain terms. I would think someone claiming to understand the issue at such a more sophisticated level than WSB would know better than to think one can fully understand the situation. Regardless of the outcome, there was a pile of gold to be made with your certainty if there was any credibility to back it up.

Do you have a finance background and relevant expertise, or are you just another armchair critic getting his word in...looking at where the price has moved and arguing "of course it has!". in this case, what makes you any different from those you're condescending?

It's new territory for all of us, why pretend otherwise?