It feels like its part of the broader, somewhat global, rebellion against the financial economy; all the domains of finance which have become disconnected from the real markets and real economy, which more-often-than-not only exist for banks to make money off each other, and to crash both the real and financial economies when they screw up.

Arguably, it started back in 2008 with the global recession, which was, again arguably, totally the result of missteps and corruption in the financial economy. By the end of that, practically no one was held accountable for what happened. and we entered an insane decade+ long bull market inflated by our sovereigns printing money rarely to support Americans, but rather American companies and our financial markets. This bull market coincides with a massive rise in cryptocurrency, which also represents a rebellion against established financial markets and the meddling of both sovereigns and financial corporations in the financial stability of the average citizen.

Then, you reach short-interest, which historically serves some minuscule, though non-zero, amount of utility for the real economy, and has come under legitimate fire as being another tool which puts our economy at risk. I think the problem with short selling is best summed up by the end of the Big Short, as the main characters are sitting on steps of an abandoned bank, having made billions of dollars profiting off of the destruction of the American economy. The strange thing about markets, and economics in general, is that they are self-fulfilling prophesies. If enough people want a stock to drop, if they want a company to suffer by having a financial interest in it suffering; it will. This is different from simply selling a stock, which in-some-way causes the price to drop, because it changes the narrative from "I don't think it will go up" to "I think it will go down". By selling a stock, you're removing your stake; by short-selling, you're increasing your stake in a negative direction (and moreover, short interest is almost always leveraged, which compounds the problem).

In other words, I think the increasing zeitgeist surrounding the perception of our financial markets as being unable to serve the interests of the real economy, and more importantly the average American, is an unusually accurate response to a real problem, and it follows that it would become a social justice issue. The government needs to take this seriously; again, economies are self-fulfilling prophesies. Crisis often start not because there is a crisis, but because people believe there's a crisis.

This is correct I feel. The other part of the attitude is that the financial sector doesn't actually provide any value to anyone except the financial sector, it's seen a wealth horde for those who manipulate systems causing far reaching consequences. It's not respected and often not understood by the people. Short selling is seen as especially malicious as it causes a preemptive destruction of something in a time when everything is getting destroyed anyway, and doing so to make those who are already rich richer when people are literally starving due to unemployment isn't a good look.

> I think the problem with short selling is best summed up by the end of the Big Short, as the main characters are sitting on steps of an abandoned bank, having made billions of dollars profiting off of the destruction of the American economy.

That frankly is the wrong takeaway, or at least completely missing the original sin IMO.

The original sin is banks that wrote mortgages to people who shouldn't have them, with terms that basically fucks them over. In the absence of the short side, someone might not have profited, some FI may not have keeled over, but the people, who were sold those mortgages, were still fucked just the same.

The short side, calling bullshit on the long side, would not have existed, or at least be very foolish to do so, if the long side weren't doing something so stupid at such a scale that actually threatened the day to day lives of people.

I would argue that the original original sin is the fact that the government would bail out the banks writing these mortgages. The fact that the banks knew this encourages them to do take reckless actions in the name of profit. Why wouldn't they? There's no downside for them.

It's another case of the government attempting to help the economy, but only hurting it.

Ok, that's fair.

My point being that it's the wrong takeaway to get mad at shorts for calling something bullshit and getting reward for it, and it sound rather irrational to me.

The dog / cat shit pile was junk mortgage bundled into a CDO and getting a AAA rating, in which pension funds buys it thinking it's safe. In the absence of the shorts, those mortgage would have gone into default, the CDOs would have become worthless, or downgraded, forcing pension funds to sell.

It's still the people holding the bag. The shorts weren't the ones initiating the bad behaviour, they made money on someone else's bad behaviour.

And of course, the government bailed the FIs out just the same.

Prematurely causing companies to go under puts thousands of people out of work. Kind of like how the Fed keeps interest rates low so zombie corporations can keep rolling over the debt --keeping many people employed-- stopping Wall Street from tanking businesses helps middle class people keep their jobs, so the thinking goes.

Shorting stocks doesn't cause businesses to tank.

What determines the success of a company like GameStop is whether people go to their stores and spend enough money to cover business expenses. It has nothing to do with the price of the stock.

The explanation I heard was not that the shorting itself causes the company to tank, but that hedge funds are incentivised to do whatever they can to cause companies to tank once they hold large short positions - via disinformation campaigns, for example. I seem to remember Toys'R'Us suffered a somewhat similar fate not so long ago?

Amazon, Walmart and Target were the ones most responsible for Toys R Us going out of business.

They actively ran ads to attract customers away from Toys R Us.

It depends, the PE firms that bought Toys R Us did what is considered a hostile move in an leveraged buyout (LBO) which is to saddle Toys R Us with lots of debt (aka they raised debt financing to buy the company) so it had to do everything it could to pay the debt and also generate profits for the PE firms and probably not enough to focus on anything else innovation or operation-wise. Its been noted that LBOs have lead to the demise of several famous companies as noted by Investopedia and LBOs has since gained notoriety.

See: https://www.barrons.com/articles/private-equity-firms-provid...

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-toys-r-us-leveraged-b...

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/toys-r-...

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/leveragedbuyout.asp#:~:....

While true that has nothing to do with shorts.

It wasn't intended as an example of short selling because my point was that the GME saga isn't about short selling per se, but about sticking one in the eye of organisations that tank businesses just to make a profit.

That's an oversimplification. A low stock price affects a lot of things, including a company's ability to raise capital.

You're right, but shorts don't _cause_ a stock to be low (in normal/retail circumstances). They're a bet on a stock being overvalued to begin with.

- yes, shorting involves selling stock which nominally pushes prices lower, etc etc hat tip illegal S&D

I kinda disagree, shorting messes with the supply/demand curve by "creating" more shares.

If person A has a share, then B borrows it to short and sells it to person C, now both A and C are effectively holding the same share. Put another way, two people have had their demands met by a single share, increasing supply.

Only if A sells naked shorts, which is illegal. In ordinary circumstances A and C do not and cannot hold the same share. A only holds a claim against B to return the same number of shares as were borrowed.

No that's not the case. The scenario I described actually happens, and is not naked shorting. That's how GME got >100% short interest.

For all you know, you could be the "A" in this situation. Many brokers will lend out your shares, but from your perspective you are just long.

Businesses need credit to get anything done. With a low stock price, businesses need to put larger collateral, which could be more than a bussiness's liquidity.

The stock price does matter

whether the markets affect a company's viability depends on their capital structure, of which the public offering is a part, as well as how leveraged the company's various income streams and assets are. it's not as simple as having enough income to cover expenses, although cash flow is a crucial part of the calculus.

What is the cost per middle class job saved? I'm sure someone has statistics on this.

The logic seems to go that the Fed should contract out job creation to private companies, which in theory produce economic growth. But this creates a feedback loop, where public revenues generated by said growth goes back to private companies.

The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” - David Graeber

The academic evidence is overwhelmingly against this hypothesis[1]. Short sellers make money by identifying companies that are unhealthy, overvalued, or even outright fraudulent. Almost all the time these conditions precede the short selling activity. The evidence shows that short selling improves corporate governance, reduces fraud, improves price efficiency, and slows the formation of speculative bubbles.

Even the lay notion that short sellers hurt companies by taking capital away misses the bigger picture. Virtually all short selling takes place in a long/short portfolio. (Dedicated short sellers make up less than 1% of hedge fund assets.) The proceeds from short sales are reinvested in other companies. Even if you think short selling "destroys jobs" at the shorted companies, then the converse is that it must also create jobs at other, better companies.

[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/la88gv/shor...

This would make more sense as a narrative if there were any prominent examples of short sellers materially harming the operations of a company, but I can't find any. In theory short sellers could help push a company into insolvency, but so could a lot of other vicious cycles for a failing company- worse terms from suppliers, worse credit terms, less trust from customers.

The Wikipedia page on "bear raid" mentions a single example, from 1609. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear_raid

I don't get it either. But it seems that a majority, or at least a large vocal minority of people believe you should either support corporations or do not support them, but you should never do anything against them.

Example: when you write a comment criticizing a company or their policies, you get tons of replies saying "well, if you don't like them, don't use them. Don't go around badmouthing them."

In the eyes of many, you should either help corporations or ignore them. Anything else is considered unethical, unconscionable, "bitching", etc.

> How the hell did short selling become a social justice boogeyman?

It so happened that most of the short sellers are the members of the 'special rules for us' club - the same club that has been ripping off and living off the regular investors for decades. The actual targets of this are the likes of analysts, fund CEOs, etc on CNBC/Fox Business and their lawyers, accountants and politicians.

How have short sellers been ripping off regular investors?

> How have short sellers been ripping off regular investors?

Not short sellers. The set of people who have been ripping off regular investors happen to encompass the majority of short sellers. Think the organized pump and dump that happen on CNBC every day. Those are the real target of the retail rage. They just can't articulate it well and since short sellers bet against the typical retail bet and since most of short sellers are the members of the 'special rules for us' group, short sellers are the target.

P.S. I'm short GME.

A lot of people get angry when you bet against success.

Which is ludicrous. Success is not a uniform good, nothing wrong with shorting Enron stock or bonds issued by the Third Reich.

Also nothing wrong with bringing an irrationally high price down to something more rational... ordinary citizens that are sellers get hurt, but citizens who are ordinary buyers are helped.

The company is hurt if it wants to do a secondary stock offering, but is helped if it wants to do a stock buyback.

Also, short selling increases the amount of money going into the dividend pool. If some stock has 140% short interest and issues 10 million dollars in dividends, short sellers have to pony up 14 million dollars, and the long position holders share those 24 million dollars.

Disclosure: never sold short, but I am in the financial services industry. I do not speak for my employer.

this just happens from time to time, it's part of mass psychology for whatever reason. people just have a moral intuition that short selling is bad.

Read about Clarence Saunders and the Great Piggly-Wiggly Corner of 1923. Similar story, populist Main Street guy going up against the short sellers. Except in the 1920s.

It's simple.

Short sellers want the price of stocks to go down, which makes them bad people, because everyone currently invested in the market wants stock prices to go up.

People who haven't yet invested in the market don't want prices to go up until they do, but nobody asks for their opinion.

Also, due to the poor state of financial education, people think that a low stock price means a company will go out of business.

Almost every working person is invested in the stock market through various pension and retirement plans. To put things very simplistically, if the stock market goes down, people aren't going to be able to retire.

Almost every working person is buying stock - for decades - until they retire.

This means that for the majority of their life, they benefit from lower stock prices. You also get a much better annual return on your investment, through dividends, when you buy under-priced stock.

Shorting deflates bubbles, before they pop. It puts the brakes on irrational markets. Working people suffer quite a bit when bubbles pop, because there are knock-on effects to employment.

Also, for most Americans, their biggest 'investment' is their home [1], with stock ownership being a distant second. That doesn't mean that we should pursue a public policy intended to drive housing costs into the stratosphere [2].

Investing into the stock market through your working life is a bet on capitalism continuing to work. Short sellers aren't going to destroy capitalism.

[1] Actually, their biggest investment is their job, but again, for some reason, policies that advocate for raising the price of labor to the moon aren't very popular.

[2] Yet, here we are, in a world where a toolshed with no running water in a coastal metro area goes for a million dollars...

I would not presume that 401k-type investors at large grok the idea of net-buying years versus net-selling years.

Because a bunch of people don't understand how the market work.

like all these people who think they're buying GME stock is going to save GameStop, cuz they somehow think that GameStop get some of the money from their stock purchases... So yeah I really don't know what the heck is going on in people's minds right now.

They don't think they'll save GameStop and almost nobody cares. They just want to see hedge funds lose money, and they've already lost billions so many have already objectively succeeded.

They also love to see Jim Cramer have meltdowns, which is almost every day now.

If you want to hate on /r/wsb that's fine (there are many legitimate reasons to hate that subreddit), but don't pretend to understand something you clearly don't.

Here's my hot take: they're victims of a pump-and-dump, only instead of enticed by the promise of a get-rich-quick scheme, they're experiencing groupthink while people encouraging and controlling this narrative are running away to the bank.

There is definitely a ton of shilling on /r/wsb and people outside thinking there is any single collective entity are ridiculously wrong.

Some people are pushing pump and dumps to make money. Some are ignorantly following along. Some genuinely treat it like a gambling addiction and enjoy it.

The GME thing though is unique, and there really is a narrative to hurt hedgies (in addition to all of the above).

Yep. One hedge fund lost billions while a dozen more who could spare the effort to model these pumps made away with every penny the "rebels" spent!

>they've already lost billions so many have already objectively succeeded

Hedge funds lost billions to the original WSB actors who wanted to profit from a short squeeze. The activist investors of GME were just handing the hedge funds more money.

Jim Cramer is entirely a performer now. It's his job to put on a show and have meltdowns.

Some hedge funds lost billions, other hedge funds maid billions. Some HF will short and still make billions.

Hedge funds make money by having better information than their opponents. When buy and HODL appears on national news, you know that hedge funds are accounting for this in their strategy. It's naive to assume that activist investors could hurt them at this point.

That was the narrative a month ago before Melvin announced losing billions, so much they actually required billions in emergency capital. "We've closed our positions. Now please sell GME."

'The hedge funds are smarter' is as stupid as 'the VCs know better.' It's a narrative they have to push to stay relevant. Otherwise they'd just point towards their balance sheets to shut people up.

It's theoretically impossible for hedge funds, in aggregate, to outperform the market.

https://web.stanford.edu/~wfsharpe/art/active/active.htm

You're assuming that hedge funds trade like self-professed WSB autists rather than professionals. There is a difference in being stupid and being completely nonsensical. You don't ask stochastic calculus interview questions, and simultaneously risk your entire holdings on HODLing all your shorts.

> We've closed our positions. Now please sell GME

Nobody would expect anyone to behave that way. Hedge funds have clients and need to reassure them that they aren't going to lose all their money. Any rational investor knew that Melvin could have opened up new short positions after GME had skyrocketed.

Hedge funds may not be smart enough be beat the market, but they're certainly smarter than a group of people who learned what a "short" is, after the squeeze.

I'm sorry, but what are you talking about? Everything you say is a denial of reality.

> Nobody would expect anyone to behave that way. Hedge funds have clients and need to reassure them that they aren't going to lose all their money. Any rational investor knows that Melvin could be opening up new short positions after GME had skyrocketed.

I don't care what people expected. I'm telling you what happened. And Melvin lost money. Obviously some hedge funds made money too, but you are specifically defending Melvin's position wrt GME.

> Hedge funds may not be smart enough be beat the market, but they're certainly smarter than a group of people who learned what a "short" is, after the squeeze.

This is why hedge funds lost money in the first place. Your denial is the fuel that continues to make /r/wsb successful, so honestly I find it refreshing. You want to believe you/they are smarter. That's it. You have no data to back up your claim. If you were right, GME would never have popped a second time and it would be trading for less than 1/10 its current price. You can call it irrational all you want, this opportunity is making people money that reject your thesis.

I'll continue to bet my money on my thesis and so far I have been ridiculously successful (far more than I was making at FAANG). I've already pocketed enough to retire so I'm not concerned about volatility. I encourage you to invest your money however you see fit. I'll do the same. So far it's working great for me.

> you are specifically defending Melvin's position wrt GME.

You need some reading comprehension lessons. That's not what I'm saying at all. The people who made money off the GME squeeze aren't the same people on a moral crusade against hedge funds. DeepFuckingValue bought GME because he performed thoughtful analysis and determined it to be undervalued. Sticking it to hedge funds was just a nice bonus. A schmuck who bought GME at $420.69 did so because someone on the internet told them it would be the best way to get revenge on the hedgies.

> I've already pocketed enough to retire so I'm not concerned about volatility.

Do what you want. I'm not worried about you. I'm worried about the average joe who loses $1000 on GME, declares the market is rigged, and never invests their money again. If there's anything that will kill hedge funds, it would be increasing financial literacy, not short squeeze memes.

> I'm worried about the average joe who loses $1000 on GME, declares the market is rigged, and never invests their money again.

Isn't your entire argument that hedge funds are smarter investors, and therefore you cannot compete with them? And since hedge funds aren't accessible to people that aren't rich, doesn't that mean the market is rigged?

It sounds to me like you're upset that people are educating themselves about the market and drawing different conclusions than you want them to. It's their money and they can do what they want with it.

> Isn't your entire argument that hedge funds are smarter investors, and therefore you cannot compete with them?

I don't think that hedge funds are particularly smart, outside of convincing their clients of their value. I'm saying that hedge funds are smarter than "investors" that think that buying GME at $300 going to meaningfully hurt hedge funds in any way. I'm not upset at the people losing money. I'm upset at the people peddling these imagined narratives as facts, which ends up causing people to lose money.

> I'm upset at the people peddling these imagined narratives as facts, which ends up causing people to lose money.

I'm not really a fan of misinformation either, but I will defend people's right to share their opinions freely (except in extreme situations where it advocates violence).

This is hardly unique to /r/wsb though. I mean yeah, I wish most people there were better informed as well. But I'm not sure how to solve that problem.

In my opinion /r/wsb is a net positive, although it obviously has its problems. The signal to noise ratio is awful, and the amount of shilling going on is ridiculous.

> They just want to see hedge funds lose money, and they've already lost billions so many have already objectively succeeded.

They want to see hedge funds lose money, and some have lost billions while others made billions, so what exactly was acomplished?

I understand opposition to hedge funds, but it's not the case that they were all short GameStop. Some were long and made a lot of money by selling into the WSB fervor. Others were not especially interested but must have seen the price grow by 20x and seen a great opportunity to short it.

I have a high school friend who posted that they didn't care if they lost their entire investment, this was about sending a message. I'm not sure what that message was.

> Others were not especially interested but must have seen the price grow by 20x and seen a great opportunity to short it.

Near the peak I don't think there were shares available to short though, at least not publicly offered who knows what was available through Bloomberg chat.

There might not have been shares available to short but a hedge fund could still sell a lot of options. If you sold call options anywhere near the peak you could have easily closed your position by now and taken pretty much the entire sale price as pure profit.

Yes, those are very bad investing reasons. And while it feels like a game, they are investing with real money. It's not just entertainment. They will end up making different hedge funds richer, and will only end up poorer and more resentful in the end.

>They just want to see hedge funds lose money

more accurately, they wanted to see one hedge fund lose money, others, and plenty of private equity firms like Silver Lake have made a killing because of the spectacle. And I'm sure Jim Cramer loves the attention too even if he has to play the enraged TV personality for a while.

Jim Cramer must hate it when people watch his show

They can get some of the money, indirectly, through an offering. The price on the secondary market drastically changes a listed company's fundraising prospects.

But they haven't and insiders have not sold due to SEC grey area laws.

They can still raise at elevated prices, GME is still up more than 10x.

AMC did so, dumping their at the market offering at the top.

Why does anyone want to save GameStop? They're pretty notorious for shit CS and shit trade-in prices.

Or is this just people who are at the generation where they don't actually remember GameStop's actual practices and wax nostalgic about it?

Re trade-ins, should GameStop even be allowed to buy back games after selling them to you? That's like short selling.

It's just normal selling.

If I borrow a game from my friend in order to sell it to GameStop, anticipating the re-sale price will be lower then the trade in price, so I can give the game back to my friend and take a profit -- would be like short selling.

That's a specific type of shorting. In financial markets you can also enter swap agreements, or sell futures or call options. The key is that GameStop seeks to profit from price depreciation.

Just for fun we could imagine GameStop seeks to buy back every game it sells, and that games don't intrinsically decay because they're digital and the packaging is worth zero.

Come to think of it, if games are pre-ordered it's even closer to what could reasonably be considered a short.