Sorry for ignorant question here not acquainted to stock market mechanisms, but: why the time imposition of tomorrow? Who dictates that storters have to return shares and when?

Frankly I thought with puts you state time limits, and with shorts you decide for yourself when you’ll have to give shares back. If that is not so, then I guess I finally understand why everyone says shorts are super risky.

They don't have to cover shorts tomorrow, but there are ITM calls that will be expiring. The idea behind the shorts is to keep the price high until these funds have no choice but to cover.

> everyone who bought yesterday is fighting exchanges whose only option for GME is "sell" because buying is restricted

I can’t really understand how the exchange is saying “no, you’re not allowed to buy, but you can sell all you want” is legal.

First of all, the exchanges could never impose that rule, because in order to sell you need to have someone buying. It is discount brokerages imposing the rule, and they are doing so because they saw what looked like market manipulation and are not interested in helping with that sort of thing. They could have stopped trading entirely, but that would have been worse for their customers, who would have watched their positions lose value and been helpless to do anything about it.

Robinhood is currently operating under Restricting the GME stock. The only option is to sell, there are no 'buy options'

Who do you think those shares are being sold to? Robinhood's brokerage side is restricting trades, but their exchange (the "shadow" exchange they use to make money without charging commissions) is still allowing buy orders, or else they have effectively suspended GME on their exchange and have to route the sell orders elsewhere. Again, it is not possible for an exchange to only allow selling of a stock, because every share sold is a share someone else is buying.

Yea... you know other exchanges that “I” can’t use, like Canadian ones are still allowing buying right?

Plenty of American brokerages have not imposed any restrictions either, and again, a brokerage is not an exchange and it is important to know the difference if you are going to be a self-directed investor.

>I don't know how some of these shorts will find 20 million shares by tomorrow.

you're confusing shorts with options. shorts don't expire. They can be held indefinitely as long as you have the margin to keep up with the losses.

If you short more stock than exists, eventually you need to find it. Prime brokers will allow you to naked short but you have to locate shares or buy back in pretty quickly.

Shorts don't expire, but the short sellers can call in on that short and there's also interest at exceptionally high rates.

Shorts have delivery dates.

They do?

>There are no set rules regarding how long a short sale can last before being closed out.

>The lender of the shorted shares can request that the shares be returned by the investor at any time, with minimal notice, but this rarely happens in practice so long as the short seller keeps paying its margin interest.

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/shortsaleclosed....

they could always deal with the lenders, which don't gain anything if their borrowers go bankrupt and they won't even get back their pennystock. And I think these lenders already deal with them quite a bit. And obviously there's still a lot of shares with WSB and I don't see how the current situation prevents offering shares for the rocket-like USD1k.