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Eastwood

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by Eastwood

  1. Beware the gamma squeezes, fellas. Don't get burned.
  2. I took profit on half of my position. I haven't worked since March and it was a helluva trade. Still have skin in the game, though, but taking profit gives me some breathing room.
  3. I'll post a recap of everything when the dust settles on this. It's been an interesting ride and it has caused me some concerns over cantagion in the broader market.
  4. We're once again ITM for all calls on the board. Unreal.
  5. 117k+ of those were still open at the close. That's 11.7 million shares. 20% of the real float. Anyone who sold those calls naked and didn't start to cover last week have until Tuesday to do it. And the 115s were immediately ITM at the premarket open when it touched $130 briefly. Today and tomorrow are going to be a wild ride.
  6. That was a week before the huge leap Friday and most of those people are on their way out of the company in June, as my understanding goes.
  7. No, the crude market was behaving normally and then retail investors started engaging in trades they didn't understand. With this, institutional investors latched on to the thesis that GameStop was going bankrupt and started rampantly shorting it, further depressing the price. As the price dropped, the shorting accelerated to the point where hedge funds and other institutional investors were engaging in naked shorting. Essentially, they borrowed shares not to sell them, but to lend them to someone else to sell and collect lending fees as well as the profit for when they returned the shares to the original owner. Obligatory disclaimer that I am not a financial adviser and this is not financial advise. I lost my job in March due to Rona and had time to kill, so I was hunting for trades to make while killing time at home. I used to work at GameStop in undergrad, so I pulled up the stock on TDA just to see what it was up to. This was in April. I noticed that the short float was around 90% and the institutional ownership was at 102%. I thought there's no way that could be right, but other places were showing the same data. So I started researching what a "normal" short float is and what the consequences of a high float could be. That led me to the 2008 VW parabolic squeeze and the 2019 Tesla slow burn squeeze. I bought some OTM calls for May that expired worthless and realized that this is a powder keg without a lit fuse. I then bought shares and a call for January 15 21 at a 10 strike, which was 100% OTM (I exercised the hell out of that call, BTW). Looking at the 20 year chart, I saw that GME experienced huge price movements during console launches. That was the spark that was needed to light the fuse, IMO. What I didn't foresee was Ryan Cohen, the Chewy wonderboy, stepping in and starting the show early. The price shot up to almost 10 in September and that is when I posted my original post in the Markets thread. As it turns out, other people saw the same thing I did and started posting positions from farther back than mine on WallStreetBets explaining essentially the same thesis. The holiday season combined with the new console release started causing mini squeezes of retail shorts, which then caused little gamma squeezes, and the theory started gaining traction. It's possible that the main squeeze has not even started. In December, the short float was 140%(!!!) and institutional interest was 122%(!!!). Literally more shares shorted than actually exist. Literally the entire float, plus 22% more, sitting with institutional investors who are limited in how quickly and how much they can trade, effectively locking down large chunks of those shares. It is possible that every retail share bought since the institutional ownership went over 100%, possibly 18 months worth or more, is actually a "synthetic" share that was created by a short seller lending already borrowed shares to someone else who sold it to retail investors or Ryan Cohen, who is here to stay and bought a 13% stake in the company over 3 months. In the event of a full squeeze, there would be infinite demand of shares with finite supply. As the price went up, the situation started accelerating until the first 40% pop. Now there was so much attention that literally EVERY call for 01/22/2021 was ITM at expiry. Think about that for a second. Literally EVERY strike for that day was ITM. I am still dumbfounded by that. According to my ThinkOrSwim app, there were still 117,094 open interest calls at the end of the day. That means those calls are possibly being exercised on Monday or Tuesday. If all of them are exercised, that's 11,709,400 shares that HAVE to be bought by the writers of the calls to close out. The range of losses on that is anywhere from $5 per share up to $59.50 per share, as well as being 20% of the entire actual GME float, not the short float. Those are monumental losses that will possibly skyrocket as the remaining covering occurs on Monday. And data from Ortex indicates that the short interest went UP (!!!) 3 or 4% on Friday. I think we are seeing something historic with this stock. I think some funds got out over their skis, engaged in unethical and possibly illegal short selling, and thought they could short GME to zero and bankruptcy, meaning that they could pocket everything and give nothing back. They didn't think GameStop would make it to the holiday season and the new console cycle. But think about how much they hurt GameStop in the process. Market share less than $1 billion, lowered credit ratings, and less borrowing power due to depressed share price by manipulation through that naked shorting. How many layoffs because of that? How many management level people with families got let go? How about the remaining retail shareholders who lost literally billions in value up until now? Now WSB and others are excited to give the funds a taste of their own medicine and turn them upside down and shake their pockets out.
  8. If you think that sucks, they never extended out the call strike prices for today's expiry earlier in the week and GME closed above $65. The highest strike for options was 60 for today. That means literally every open option interest on the board for today was ITM. Anyone who sold naked calls for today that didn't close has to cover on Monday.
  9. By all means, SEC, please investigate GME. This squeeze happened due to naked short selling by hedge funds. It got so out of control that there were literally more shares shorted than there were existing shares by 40%. A bunch of hedge funds got their naked positions dunked on and now people are crying manipulation. Please.
  10. GME in a nutshell: Hedge funds got greedy and started shorting synthetic shares. Now they can't cover. Those who hold actual shares now set the price. Holy shit, I was right.
  11. I wouldn't want to be anywhere near GME with anything other than house money, right now. It's going to rip one way or another and the losing side is going to lose big. My cost basis is $7.50 a share, so I'm fine if it retreats heavily. But if you want to play this stock now, only do it with fun money, nothing that you will need in the future.
  12. I haven't seen Kangsta on these boards in what feels like a decade and a model train thread brings him out. I love this site. This isn't a knock on him, btw. I enjoyed his posts.
  13. No. Still holding. January 15 calls, which were heavily bought, expire tomorrow. I exercised mine this morning. They were $10 strike bought back in the summer.
  14. Technical issues has their Drilling Permit Query out of whack. They are working to fix it.
  15. Dear Stan, I wrote you but you still ain't callin'...
  16. 122% institutional ownership with 160% short float. The naked shorting of this stock will be eventually investigated, IMO.
  17. Trump is lucky that Pence isn't a stone cold political tactician and vengeful man. Trump, et al almost got him and his family killed and he's just sitting on his hands. Dick Cheney would bully, blackmail, and threaten the Cabinet into the 25th, become president, and have anyone who even so much as sneezed in his general direction that day arrested, as well as anyone who told them "bless you."
  18. That's a real head scratcher. I can't think of a reason for him to be in the RGV.
  19. There is no peaceful transfer of power, anymore. We get to try again in 2024.
  20. For those FlightAware experts who are now bored because the UT coaching search is over, it would be an interesting research exercise to see if any civilian planes have landed at Camp David over the last couple of months and never departed.
  21. 4 people would still be alive if he did that yesterday morning.
  22. The interesting thing about the blanket self pardon is that accepting a pardon is also a waiver of the Fifth Amendment right of avoiding self-incriminating. So, if he issues a blanket pardon, there might be nothing to stop the DoJ from issuing subpoena after subpoena into perpetuity compelling him to spill anything and everything about anything and everything. Business associates, family members, foreign governments... And he would have to answer under the penalty of perjury, which is a brand new offense and one he could not pardon himself of. Also, the pardon does nothing about the NY case. That's why I don't think a pardon is in order. He's fleeing the country and he might do so from Camp David where the authorities can't stop him on the tarmac.
  23. According to Burdick v. United States, a pardon carries an imputation of guilt and that accepting one carries a confession of guilt. Doesn't need to be specific. Nixon was blatantly confessing that he was indeed a crook when he accepted the pardon.
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