No.

Naked shorting is when you sell the underlying stock without borrowing it first. You have 2-3 days from transaction to settlement (depending on the market), so you can enter a transaction at T and then only locate borrow at T+2. Obviously, you're running the risk that you can't find borrow in time.

In most cases, however, you short by checking for available borrow first, and _then_ shorting.

I’m not a finance expert, but the hedge funds could have bought GME stocks sometimes between opening their short position and closing it.

The short could have been naked when it was made, but there is nothing stopping the hedge fund from buying the underlying security ahead of the short position closing.

Yes, but you cannot do that when you are short 149% of all stock. There simply is not enough stock available to cover your short position.

Which is why GME was targeted in the first place.

Is the total 149% short closing on this Friday? I was under the impression that the 100+% short position was for all shorts for all closing dates on GME? If the 149% short is spread over multiple weeks/months it seems misleading to quote the over 100% short position as a sure marker of an unlimited squeeze.

For reference, during the unlimited squeeze of Volkswagen’s stocks in 2008 it was estimated that less than 1% of Volkswagen shares were liquid — due to Porsche silently buying the majority of liquid stocks — to cover the short positions which led to the “unlimited squeeze”. I have a hard time believing that The number of liquid GME shares out there are nearly as low as 1%. The only way I could see the liquidity going that low is if institutional investors with tens or hundreds of billions dollars in market cap decide to buy up all liquid shares, effectively lowering the liquidity of GME to similar levels as Volkswagen during the 2008 unlimited short squeeze.

> I have a hard time believing that The number of liquid GME shares out there are nearly as low as 1%.

I believe the float is between 30-40%, hovering around 37%.

Surely if anything they've got 'more naked' - there's more held long, almost conspiratorial borrow disallowing, and >100% short interest.

Usually you borrow stock to sell short. You're short it because you sold it without owning it (and still have to give it back later).

Naked short is selling without even borrowing it.

I thought only market makers can short sale without the share. Is that correct?

Yes, it's not generally something for a retail trader to worry about, since the broker is providing the borrow (or disallowing the trade saying it's unavailable, as many have probably seen with GME), but hypothetically if you managed it it's generally not allowed.