Whole reason this is in the news is it was naked shorted by the Hedge Funds involved - or brokerages allowed double borrowing - and they are over 100% short. The WSB guys have long positions now in a deep way - not as much as institutions but enough that the short position can’t close if they don’t sell. Which means they command the price of the share.
WSB has a massive number of people when they started this in the 2MM range - now they are up over 6MM and everyone is buying shares and HOLDING them - some have sold off just enough to make back their initial investment but they are holding the rest and not allowing the shorts to close their position. Technically the price becomes infinite - even if the Hedge funds basically default, the brokers are still on the hook to reobtain the borrowed shares for the clients from which they were borrowed. If the WSB guys NEVER sell then they could technically start charging interest for the borrowed shares that were never returned. I understand that this is what happened with the famous VW short squeeze many many years ago.
I’ve been doing some additional digging on this since I found out about it early last week. (and yes I went out and bought a few shares just to be part of history). I found there are a lot of stocks with shorts positions above 50%. Including at least one that is at 1400% (SRPT) - if something isn’t crooked in dodge for that one then I don’t know what is.
There is already an asian player stating that as soon as markets open in Asia (Sunday night here) they are placing massive buy orders.
I have one of my shares set to sell at 2500, another at 5000. I had one at 1M but the brokerage rejected it.
I’s had a sad :’-(
Already decided that I’m going to hold onto at least 1 share forever just so that I can say I had what the WSB guys are calling “diamond hands”. Liquidity in the market is going to be a real challenging thing over the next 3 days. Rumor is that is why they locked down a bunch of the trading on Thurs/Friday - it came that close to breaking the liquidity of the market makers behind the scenes. Enough that only the Fed could have provided liquidity - which would require congressional approval to release money basically.
Thing it is really showing though is exactly how much of a two tiered system the markets have - just like politics and social media.
What I wonder is whether WSBs moves were initiated by a random bunch of anons, or whether this is military planning at it’s finest. Cyberwarfare. Somebody got that herd moving in the right direction.