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Comment by Tenoke | Hacker News Reader

Believe them or not, they can easily confirm whether GME still has > 100% shorts[0], which it does.

Yeah. So a bunch of shorts closed their position at maybe $50 when the price was skyrocketing, and then reopened their position at $300 or $400 (if they timed it with the peak).

I'm not sure why people expect the short interest to change at all. If shorts thought it was worth shorting at $15, they sure as hell would be shorting at $300 or $400.

A lot of new shorts have also jumped in when the old ones left. The old shorts haven't necessarily bought back in, especially if they're running cautious after getting their faces ripped off.

The cost of shorting the stock is a percentage of the cost of the stock on top of the stock price.

And that price has declined by 80-90% in the last week along with the percentage cost to borrow. It's still expensive to borrow GME but if you have an idea that a stock is going from 500 to 0 in a week or two you don't care about the cost to borrow.

Kind of. But it really depends on your relationship and agreement with your prime broker.

That is unlikely the case. Closing the short would require them to write massive losses. Their best strategy has always been wait it out. They most likely purchased a bunch of options to lock in their losses from getting worst and are waiting for the price to drop back down.

I may be incorrect but I believe that data is somewhat outdated from the previous FINRA short interest report; it looks like the next report is due to be shared today, Tuesday Feb. 2 at 6-PM and the next on the 9th.

So, we'll potentially see if that is indeed the case either tonight or on the 9th which I believe will have the most recent data as the one this evening will already be outdated.

Linky: https://www.finra.org/filing-reporting/regulatory-filing-sys...

The fact that there were paid Facebook and Twitter advertisements for the news stories that "mevlin exited their short" makes me think they did not

Feel free to invest based on that evidence, but I won't be joining you.

How often are news stories promoted in paid-for ads on social media? Do you know? If you don't then you're basing a decision on one piece of data with no context.

Putting that reasoning aside: do you have a link you could share that shows any of these ads?

1. there's nothing special about 101% shorts compared 99% shorts

2. bloomberg's (unofficial) estimates says it's below 100% https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-01/gamestop-...

3. even if it's at > 100% shorts, it tells you nothing about what price those shorts entered at. if they entered at $300 they're not breaking a sweat.

4. Short interest only matters when a company gets bought out. At which point, the short interest is entirely rolled back to 0% and short-sellers take the ultimate loss.

Beyond that, it could go to 100%, 200%, or whatever people feel like. There's nothing special about 100% short interest at all.

That data is not updated in real time. Unless you pay big bucks short interest data is released every two weeks. https://www.nyse.com/market-data/reference/nyse-group-short-...

If you click on "GME" on that page, it will take you to Yahoo Finance. And if you go to the "Statistics" page, you will see that the number is from January 15th. The >100% shorts number is wild disinformation at this point.

You have no idea if these shorts were opened at $5, $50, or $350.

Someone who shorted when GME was at $420.69 is gonna be laughing all the way to the bank

from that site "Database last updated on January 29, 2021"

Typically these stats are updated slowly.

Short interest data is lagged. What is the source of this website?

it's exactly this kind of misunderstanding that caused this particular herd of new investors to lose out. I've noticed a lot of people making definitive statements of wsb, even though when pressed they admit they don't know squat. This is one of many reasons I like hn better in general --- people don't usually pretend to know what they're talking about.

The question is: at what price point did those new shorts come in at?

Those that shorted it at the high, are minting greens right now.

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