The Great GameStop Short Squeeze

Here’s a Wall Street story that has everything to do with the current political moment.

GameStop is the video game retailer that almost went out of business last year. This year, a whole bunch of powerful hedge funds bet on GameStop stock going by selling the stock short.

Tiny problem:

For those unfamiliar, a short squeeze happens when a rising stock price forces short-sellers out of their position. When panic strikes and those sellers buy back stock, they send shares even higher. Here, you have what InvestorPlace Markets Analyst Tom Yeung calls a powerful feedback loop.

Yeung also sees GME stock as being a particularly relevant candidate for a short squeeze. Right now, 71.2 million of its shares are being sold short. That is even more than its total outstanding share count!

This tweet thread explains what that means:

So the short selling bear hedge funds are totally screwed. The result? Carnage:

Across most of America, GameStop is just a place to buy a video game. On Wall Street, though, it’s become a battleground where swarms of smaller investors see themselves making an epic stand against the 1%.

The funds serving the financial elite are starting to walk away in defeat. Big bets they made that GameStop’s stock would fall went wrong, leaving them facing billions of dollars in collective losses. All the wild action pushed GameStop’s stock as high as $380 on Wednesday, up from $18 just a few weeks ago.

The stunning seizure of power gives some validation to smaller-pocketed investors, many of whom are encouraging each other on Reddit and are trading stocks for the first time thanks to brokerages offering free-trading apps. It’s also left more investors on Wall Street asking if the stock market is in a dangerous bubble about to pop, as AMC Entertainment, Bed Bath & Beyond and other downtrodden stocks suddenly soar as well. The S&P 500 set a record high earlier this week, though it fell Wednesday.

Two investment firms that had placed bets for money-losing GameStop’s stock to fall have essentially thrown in the towel. One, Citron Research, acknowledged Wednesday in a YouTube video that it unwound the majority of its bet and took “a loss, 100%” to do so.

Snip.

Melvin Capital is also exiting GameStop, with manager Gabe Plotkin telling CNBC that the hedge fund was taking a significant loss. He denied rumors that the hedge fund will fail. The size of the losses taken by Citron and Melvin are unknown.

Before its recent explosion, GameStop’s stock had been struggling for a long time. The company has been losing money for years as sales of video games increasingly go online, and its stock fell for six straight years before rebounding in 2020.

That pushed many professional investors to make bets that GameStop’s stock will decline even further. In such bets, called “short sales,” investors borrow a share and sell it in hopes of buying it back later at a lower price and pocketing the difference. GameStop is one of the most shorted stocks on Wall Street.

But its stock began rising sharply earlier this month after a co-founder of Chewy, the online seller of pet supplies, joined the company’s board. The thought is that he could help in the company’s transformation as it focuses more on digital sales and closes brick-and-mortar stores. Its shares jumped to $19.94 from less than $18 on Jan. 11. At the time, it seemed like a huge move for the stock.

Smaller investors were meanwhile exhorting each other online to keep GameStop’s stock rolling higher.

The raucous discussions are full of sarcasm, self deprecation and emojis of rocket ships signifying belief that GameStop’s stock will fly to the moon.

Snip.

There is no overriding reason why GameStop has attracted this cavalcade of smaller and first-time investors, but there is a distinct component of revenge against Wall Street in communications online.

“The same rich people that caused the market crash in 2007/08 are still in power and continue to manipulate the market to get even richer, we are just taking back our fair share,” one user wrote on Reddit.

“hey mom i can’t come up for dinner,” another user wrote. “i’m bankrupting a 10 figure hedge fund with the boys.”

Beyond personal attacks, the battle has also created big financial losses for Wall Street players who shorted GameStop’s stock.

As GameStop’s gains grew and short sellers scrambled to get out of their bets, they had to buy shares to do so. That accelerated the momentum even more, creating a feedback loop. As of Tuesday, short sellers of GameStop were already down more than $5 billion in 2021, according to S3 Partners.

Much of professional Wall Street remains pessimistic that GameStop’s stock can hold onto its immense gains. The company is unlikely to start making big enough profits to justify its $22.2 billion market valuation anytime soon, analysts say. The stock closed Wednesday at $347.51. Analysts at BofA Global Research raised their price target Wednesday — to $10.

All the mania is raising some concern that investors are taking excessive risks, and reporters asked Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Wednesday whether the Fed’s moves to support markets through the pandemic is helping to push stock prices too high.

In short, the hedge funds suffered a serious bloodletting:

Did the Wall Street titans laid low by retail investors shrug their shoulders over the loss and slink off quietly into the night to lick their wounds? They did not. Instead, our elites staged a fullbore freakout over being beaten at their own game(stop).

Perhaps the most flagrant example was where noted CNN tool Chris Cillizza declared the GameStop short squeeze an example of Trumpism. Because how dare ordinary people think they can beat the elite at their own games?

There was the “white supremacy” canard.

(Babylon Bee: “Merriam-Webster Changes Definition Of ‘White Supremacist’ To ‘Anyone Who Wins In The Stock Market When They’re Not Supposed To’.)

There’s even the “Russia! Russia! Russia!” cliche:

And finally, a Berkeley professor wants you know they’re investing in GameStop because they’re not having sex:

Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts William Galvin wants a 30-day trading suspension of GameStop, because retail investors can’t be allowed to make money off the mistakes of their betters.

Likewise, NASDAQ head Adena Friedman says that they’ll halt trading in a stock if mere mortals are making money off it.

And trading platforms Robinhood and Ameritrade halted trading in GameStop And AMC.

Here’s Tucker Carlson:

Here’s a Saagar Enjeti clip from The Hill:

There are valid reasons for hedge funds and short sellers to exist. But no one, least of all our corrupt political establishment, should let them get away with the classic “I keep my profits private but force the government to underwrite my losses” con game.

The memes and Tweets are something to behold:

And this morning?

This may all seem extremely irrational. But thanks to the Federal Reserve’s endless money pump, the market has been irrational for a long time. And the biggest irrationality was short-sellers shorting more stock than actually existed.

I should point out that I have no money in GameStop, AMC, or Nokia stock (unless there’s some tucked away in one of my various 401K funds, which I rather doubt). Though honestly, as weird as this year is already going, I’m tempted to put a few hundred dollars in Dogecoin…

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2021 at 7:54 AM and is filed under Economics, Media Watch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

7 Responses to “The Great GameStop Short Squeeze”

  1. Borepatch says:
    January 28, 2021 at 10:12 PM

    I think you have the wrong Saagar Enjeti video.

    BTW, that video is really, really wrong but that’s a different issue

  2. Lawrence Person says:
    January 28, 2021 at 10:31 PM

    I don’t think so. It’s the one that starts out “There are many enemies of the people…” I’m mainly concerned with the first five minutes or so. Try reloading the page.

    If you think it’s wrong, feel free to expound on that.

  3. In The Mailbox: 01.28.01 : The Other McCain says:
    January 29, 2021 at 1:56 AM

    […] Animal’s Daily Social Media News Babalu Blog: Jose Marti, Cuba’s Apostle BattleSwarm: The Great Game Stop Short Squeeze, also, Corrupt Establishment Moves To Screw Retail Investors & Bail Out Hedge Funds Behind The […]

  4. LinkSwarm for January 29, 2020 « Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog says:
    January 29, 2021 at 11:35 AM

    […] I joked about putting money into Dogecoin, it’s up over […]

  5. Hi Ho Silver, Away to the Moon! « Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog says:
    February 1, 2021 at 3:52 PM

    […] the WallStreetBets crowd that carried out the Great GameStop Short Squeeze have decided that silver is their next target for making […]

  6. Followup: Is The Silver Squeeze A Ruse? « Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog says:
    February 2, 2021 at 11:19 AM

    […] Adam Ford with Not The Bee explains the GameStop short squeeze, including more background detail on the origins of the squeeze than was in my original post: […]

  7. “What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 348 « Whipped Cream Difficulties says:
    March 14, 2021 at 2:04 PM

    […] I was hoping to find some good Pi related videos on YouTube. Instead, I turned up a lot of crap about something called “Pi Coin”, which sounds to me like a scam cryptocurrency. (Is “scam cryptocurrency” redundant? In any case, I’m putting my money into DogeCoin.) […]

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