Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

I understand all of that - the issue is now it appears that the hedge funds are mostly getting out of Gamestop.  So buying Gamestop stock now at $350 a share or whatever it is gets you...a share of stock that just days ago was trading at four dollars.  It has gone up because Gamestop is a failing company - that's why they got shorted in the first place.  So the populist message of buying and holding Gamestop stock now is benefiting the big investors you mentioned earlier who will be more than happy to make a ton of money on a mostly worthless stock.  The people who get screwed will be the ones who own the stock when it goes back in the toilet, and it appears to me that this may be the people who are being told to hold or buy to stick it to the man.

I wouldn’t say that GameStop is a failing company. They weren’t Enron or going to zero. It was a company on hard times that has been in process restructuring and arguably on the upswing. 

Hedge funds were not just shorting the company. Please stop with that nonsense.  They were shorting 140% of all shares in existence- something that should be illegal- and they were actively trying to manipulate it and drive it into the dirt and as close to zero as possible so they could make money on their speculative bet that it would fall. 

And the hedge funds aren’t out of it completely. That’s the lie they’re spinning right now. Getting Robinhood to stop the trading and trying to get the stock going down is exactly what the shorts are trying to do right now in order to minimize their losses. They are not out of it. 

The hedge funds have lost $5.5 billion of cold hard cash shorting GameStop just in January- that’s money that went from their pockets on Wall Street to the pockets of little guys on Main Street- just this month alone.

I'm not defending the hedge funds at all - I'm saying that right now any fund that owns Gamestop stock is not a long term investment and so efforts to get people to buy right now feel more like a way for the current stock owners to get out before it inevitably falls back to earth.  You have to be crazy to think Wall Street isn't right now scheming to make sure Main Street take the hit when Gamestop stock falls back to earth.

I'm not defending the hedge funds at all - I'm saying that right now any fund that owns Gamestop stock is not a long term investment and so efforts to get people to buy right now feel more like a way for the current stock owners to get out before it inevitably falls back to earth.  You have to be crazy to think Wall Street isn't right now scheming to make sure Main Street take the hit when Gamestop stock falls back to earth.

Buying it and having the price soar upwards would’ve wiped out a lot of those hedge funds. Like non-existent- all gone bye bye. They didn’t close out their positions- demand on stock was so high and they shorted so much- more than actually exists- don’t think it would’ve been possible for them.

It falling back to earth right now only benefits Wall Street hedge funds- and that’s exactly what they want. If it free falls back to earth- they’ll take losses but they won’t be wiped out. This thing kept going- they’d have been wiped out. 

The hedge funds have lost $5.5 billion of cold hard cash shorting GameStop just in January- that’s money that went from their pockets on Wall Street to the pockets of little guys on Main Street- just this month alone.

I don't exactly get it but I sure hope you are right

Buying it and having the price soar upwards would’ve wiped out a lot of those hedge funds. Like non-existent- all gone bye bye. They didn’t close out their positions- demand on stock was so high and they shorted so much- more than actually exists- don’t think it would’ve been possible for them.

It falling back to earth right now only benefits Wall Street hedge funds- and that’s exactly what they want. If it free falls back to earth- they’ll take losses but they won’t be wiped out. This thing kept going- they’d have been wiped out.

I'm not defending the hedge funds at all - I'm saying that right now any fund that owns Gamestop stock is not a long term investment and so efforts to get people to buy right now feel more like a way for the current stock owners to get out before it inevitably falls back to earth.  You have to be crazy to think Wall Street isn't right now scheming to make sure Main Street take the hit when Gamestop stock falls back to earth.

Remember, the way to short stock is this:

• "Borrow" shares from an owner.
• Sell those shares immediately. You now owe the owner who lended you the share that number of shares, not the number of dollars those shares were worth.
• The incentive for the owner of the shares is that you are paying them some sort of fee for being able to borrow their shares. That's where they make their money. 
• At some point you have to pay back the borrower, and you have to pay them back in shares, not in dollars. If the shares are worth less than what they were when you sold them, you pocket the difference (minus whatever fee you had to pay for the privilege of borrowing). If the shares are worth more than they were when you sold them, you have to buy them at whatever the current price is to return them.

Where a "short squeeze" occurs is that shorting a stock is essentially a margin trade. If the paper value of the shares is high enough that you trigger how much margin the lender of those shares is willing to grant you, they can give you a margin call and force you to sell the shares.

But for some of these hedge funds, if they can put off their creditors until the stock drops back down to reality, they might not actually have to sell at all, in which case it WON'T cause them to lose a dime. As long as they're still holding the shares, their losses are paper losses. 

The large mutual funds (who are probably the lenders of those shares) want to keep that business--lending shares to hedge funds for a fee--more than they want a one-time windfall of a margin call and wiping out their customer base. Especially since those mutual funds know that GameStop isn't worth the current share price, so that if they do get their shares back from the hedge funds they are just going to have to sell them immediately anyway and drive the price right back down. 

So Mdot is right--any price drop now is good for the hedge funds. Price drops now can help them hold off their creditors and not be forced into the margin call that puts those PAPER losses into ACTUAL losses. 

man alot of slippery shit going on

Robinhood- which has tens of millions of active users- completely restricted people from buying GameStop, AMC, and a host of others.

They allowed people to sell the stock- and actually changed the sell button from red to green - after removing the green buy button in the app.

Tells you all you need to know really. If you forbid people from buying a stock and only allow them to sell it- what’s gonna happen- you’re going to push the price down. If that’s not deliberate and blatant market manipulation what is?

Edit: more than half of all Robinhood users- which is MILLIONS of people- own GameStop stock. They are unable to freely trade it. But hey- they can sell it in their Robinhood app. EL OH EL.

wow remind me never to recommend Robinhood