This is the "buy high sell never" part of the meme.

Imagine there are only two shares GME.

You buy two GME for $1ea. Two short sellers needs 1 GME each lest they hemorrhage money on fees. You loudly announce your plan to hold half your GME forever. The short sellers trip over each other to pay you stupid money for the one GME you are selling. You then sit on the other GME for awhile, maybe sell it in a year or two for a buck. In any case despite buying two and selling one you've made a ton of profit.

Now scale this up to several million people.

> Now scale this up to several million people.

And many more shares, most of them hold by corporate and institutions (some of those institutions will be happy to lend shares as well). Also more shares can be issued.

My understanding is the long term plan is to try and bankrupt some hedge funds or drive the SEC/regulatory bodies to enforce rules against the elite class of investors; its not entirely about profit for everyone.

There's so much discussion on HackerNews today about people who are going to lose out on these stocks where I've seen a healthy amount of comments on Reddit in the last week of people buying stock merely "for the lulz". I think there's a non-insignificant amount of "investors" who have tossed paltry sums at $GME with no plans on making a return.

Honestly, I'd have done the same, but I don't do any form of stock trading so I don't have accounts on any platforms to do it. I've done the same with various crypto shitcoins and made a few bucks off throwing $50 or $100 at something I don't expect to ever see return on too.

I am curious what the average holding is for GME. $100 * 2 million WSB subscribers is $200m to make a stock go to $24b market cap. That isn’t a lot of cash. People are posting screenshots with $10k+ holdings on WSB. Monday volume indicates a massive amount of stock movement.

At some point those shorts are due - if the owner of the shorts doesn't hold the necessary stocks, it's going to be expensive.

That's my understanding. What happens afterwards? No ideas. Some people want to see hedge funds burn, I would not mind that either.

Short sales do not work like that. You can have a short position indefinitely, as long as you pay the margin interest and meet the margin maintenance requirements. Options positions are another story, in-the-money calls do require delivery of the shares by the expiration date, and next such date is tomorrow.

Nobody is going to make the hedge funds burn. At this point the hedge funds are fleecing whoever was buying shares or options yesterday (who do you think they bought them from?).

Exactly, “wall st” as a whole is making bank off this volatility, as well as Blackrock and Fidelity finds. The real way to actually stick it to wall st would be if all of main st sold all their equities..

Thanks for teaching me something I did not know! May the post above be forever a monument to my ignorance!

shirt sellers borrow stock, then sell it. when the shirt is up, they are required to buy new stock and return the borrowed shares.

if the stock price is higher when they borrow and sell, and lower when they buy and return, they make a profit equal to the difference. they lose money if the stock price goes up. all these people buying GME and driving the price up will hold GME stock, and the shirt sellers will be forced to purchase back the stock at premium prices. even if the stock price goes down slightly, the people buying up all the GME will still profit.

but more importantly a lot of people's goal is to f over a major firm that constantly over leverages itself.

That’s main goal. But what is long term goal of the position. After short sellers go bust. What are people going to do with their positions?

There will always be more short sellers to bet on the overpriced stock to go down ;)

I believe the original r/WSB idea was to induce a short squeeze and cause Melvin Capital to lose their shirts.

See: http://www.isthesqueezesquoze.com/

That’s the main goal. But what’s the plan afterwards? I see posts with people holding a non trivial amount of stock. Losing $100 to own hedgefunds is different than risking $10k+.