That's absurd. People in WSB probably bought low and haven't sold at all or sold on the way up. Look at the volume. Who is shorting at these prices with this kind of activity?
Who has the money to keep buying at $350 to propel the stock to $400? Definitely not WSB. I know plenty of people dipping their toes in and buying 10 or 20 shares for fun right now. But there's 55M shares trading at all time highs. That's not retail. That's day trading shops and deep pockets.
> Who has the money to keep buying at $350 to propel the stock to $400
Delta hedging, potentially
> But there's 55M shares trading at all time highs
55M is the float but there's nowhere near that much actively available. Fidelity and Blackrock together own about 25M I think [0], along with other institutional investors as well as staff in stock incentives. Some of this will be liquidated as the price goes up but not all of it.
> But there's 55M shares trading at all time highs.
One thing that’s different is commission-free trades. Plenty of folks buying and selling 10 shares at a time a dozen times/day “to profit off volatility”.
Doesn’t explain everything, but retail can put through more volume than ever before.
Just checked GME spread though, and it’s about $1.50 or about 0.5%, so the market makers must be happy with that and the volume.
Are market makers happy? Don’t they have to do a bunch of delta hedging, and isn’t that harder to do with the stock being so volatile? I expect that risk is reflected in the spread, but then again, I don’t really understand markets.
The models for any short selling have just imploded. I’d imagine a lot of low-capitalized short sellers just exited a lot of positions and won’t take any for a while.
“Holding until it’s over” now means having enough capital for 100x any short position you take. That limits how much you can short.
The total market cap of GME is about $25bn at today's prices. That doesn't seem beyond the ability of retail. There's a lot of people with $10-100K to play with: rich but not mega rich.
The aggressiveness of the short squeeze is unprecedented and can only be executed with aggressive cheap out of money call options. That looks like gamers to me :)
