I'm glad this place has quieted down enough for some actual DD written by a monkey with a keyboard and Adderall.
Disclaimer: I am that monkey. Let me explain to you what happened, play by play. I will give you illiterates who hate reading a spoiler up front:
We were within approximately 30 seconds of triggering a nuclear bomb that would have blown up the market. Do I have your attention? Here goes:

1. ⁠Yesterday, new call option strike prices were added all the way up to $570. Do I have to go over gamma squeezes again? Really? We've been over this: when deep out-of-the-money call options start being gobbled up and the price starts moving towards being in-the-money, the call writers have to hedge their risk of having their sold calls exercised, typically by buying stock. This creates upwards pressure on the market. We've been seeing these movements all week.
2. ⁠Yesterday after market, you probably saw that coordinated effort to drive the price down and spook retail investors into a mass sell-off. It didn't work.
3. ⁠Last night, Robinhood sent out a message to users: you could no longer enter into new options. You could exercise them if you had the collateral (money in the account) to do so. Very interesting and the first sign of pants-shitting fear.
4. ⁠Today, the market opened very strong. It opened so strong that we were looking at a self-perpetuating gamma squeeze all the way up way past $570.
5. ⁠At approximately 9:58 am, the stock had reached $468 in a parabolic move.
6. ⁠Two minutes earlier, at 9:56 am, Robinhood tweeted that they were not allowing users to buy GME stock, but they would allow selling.
7. ⁠The trend instantly halted and started a collapse downwards, before picking up a bit, especially after some retail was allowed back in.

Okay, now that you are clear on the facts, understand this: The market ran out of liquidity today, or was threatening to get close enough that they killed it. What does that mean? It means they ran out of shares and/or capital. They wouldn't let you buy new shares because we were burning through all the shares on the market.
I saw an unsubstantiated post from a user (u/zshub) who said a market sell order executed at $2600 for him. Also, someone else for over $5,000 per share. Do you get the severity of the situation, if that's true? It means the buying was getting to the point where it was just about to put INFINITE pressure on the price of the shares. It means virtually any ask was getting bid.
How do you get infinite upwards pressure? A gamma squeeze triggering the mother of all short squeezes, just like we predicted. The call writers need shares to hedge. Retail is still buying more. The short sellers need over 100% of the float back. Add these together. There were more shares needed than existed on the open market. That's what a liquidity crisis is.
Listen to this to this remarkable (if infuriating) interview where the chairman of Interactive Brokers admits that they didn't have the capital to pay out the winners (us), so they took their ball and went home. DO YOU GRASP HOW INSANE IT IS THAT HE SAID THEY NEEDED TO SHUT DOWN BUY ORDERS TO "PROTECT THE MARKET"? Hello! He's not talking about the market for GME shares. He's talking about the entire market! The New York Stock Exchange. The NASDAQ. All that.
Remember the movie Snowpiercer? Do you remember that scene where the lower class people realize the soldiers who oppress them have no bullets? Go to the 1:00 minute mark of this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EH1EtiOhr6o
It kick starts a full blown rebellion. They have no bullets. It's the exact same in this market: No capital. No shares. Infinite losses inbound.
TL;DR: For all you who will just skip to the bottom to ask, "Do I get my tendies now?" the answer is this: they NEED NEED NEED your shares. Do you get that? HOLD. Like the guy in the movie, scream, "They're out of bullets!" and create a stampede. That's how we win.
They needed your shares so badly that they literally risked PRISON TIME to get them. They tried robbing you, and I'm not even exaggerating. They were within 30 seconds of all being wiped out today.
Credit: u/PlayFree_Bird

This text was originally posted in Mauerstrassenwetten by u/knutolee. I thought his message was so powerful that I asked him for permission to translate, post (can share chat with Mod if required or check directly with him) and fuck his wife (ok didn’t ask for permission) after and he agreed to all most of this wholeheartedly – like a true Autist. I am trying to catch the message – so don’t expect a word by word translation as you can never catch the greatness of the text in it’s entirety and I got to translate it in a way that even a US degenerate can follow it.
As usual no financial advice, I more or less just copied the text because I liked the text and I like the share. In general I have likely lost more than I won and the stock market is a mystery in itself to me. So make your own due dilligence and don’t trust financial advice of others (the argument for that you can read to a certain extent below).
Autists, Degenerates, Idiocracy of the World – let me get this straight!
In the coming days I don’t wanna see all this whining and bitching on this sub and espescially in the daily GME threads anymore. On every fucking corner of this sub I smell doubt, you read messages the likes of „this is over“, „we missed the squeeze“, „I am going to loose it all“, „entered at 320$ - I am doomed“. What the fuck is wrong with you retards, did you fucking wanker your wifes boyfriend dick all night and lost your mind over the effort to do so? I think I got to get this accross the Buddy Stephens way to get you down to fucking earth and get your attitude right.
1) You come to a sub called wallstreetbets and yolo your hard earned money in $GME
You realize what you are doing here - you true fuck - dont you? This is a community of full blown first class true tits up degenerates which take pleasure in posting losses accumulating into the millions every fucking month and you are putting your money into a BET – yes my dear it is written out in the name of this very fucking sub Wallstreet-B-E-T-S!!! – and follow DD posted by people with names like „SHOW_ME_YOUR_ANAL_TITS“? You realize this is not a fucking Disney ferry „One-Wish-comes-true“ show and we see all day long gain porn and loss porn is something which doesn’t exist in this world? This is a band of true autists which occupied an absolute niche when it comes down to trading (and we even don’t trade stocks normally!). This is the place where one wants to enjoy the sado-masochistic part of the retarded capitalistic system we are living in. Yes we have some (maybe a lot) DD diamonds in this sub which by the way are now impossible to find because you degenerate fucks spam the entire system to the moon but no sane long-term investor would consider to invest into any of these investments – this is about „get rich or die trying!“. This is not investing!
2) Yeah but I saw Reddit in the news and all that stuff about GME and it was going through the roof becasue there is going to be short squeeze and on top of it the hedge funds fucked up, hihihi
If this entire thing was a safe bet why exactly would not the fucking entire world jump on this train? (and even you might get this image from all this „Saudi Arabia calling, China calling, Africa calling posts – but please they invest into BABA, Aramco or I don’t know what’s the hot shit in Lagos stock exchange right now – could be though the next big thing – got to see if I can find a DD on this). So why is this not happening? Because it is a fucking BET – the stock market is a fucking Casino and the major difference between investing and us is that they are always just bet on black or red, while we always go for the magical zero. It is totally unclear whether all of us going to show up at Miami Beach with our Porsche Cayenne or Tesla Model S and hit on the girls (or boys) on the beach! The reasons are layed out to you every fucking day with yet another quality DD that most of us simply dont understand! And yes our chances to already sit on the fucking moon slurping our Pinha Coladas would be certainly higher if everything was going the way we believe the system should be working but even the last person who joined this sub by now should realize – you are potentially fucking with the system itself (by the way something this sub never intentionally wanted and you shouldn’t do if you like the system).
3) Hey but when is the squeeze of the squoze going to happen? 😓
So there is this story going through the media and from Florida to Colorado everybody remotely degenerate is yoloing money into GME. It’s a fucking global movement now (or not – could be also the same 50.000 degenerates cheering up themselves the entire time which would much better fit this place) and according to the DD we just need to have 🙌💎and the shorts a bleeding their panties, their balls feel squozen (and not in a good way) and they are completely in defensive mode. What do you think what people who are responsible for Multi-billion $$$ HF are going to do? How do you think you become a person who is responsible for such an operation? Do you think these guys have served as altar boys or girls in church (no offense if so)? What is wrong with you? Seriously! Do you think if they get some headwind they are going to say: Oh boy – we got defeated and going to realize a multi-fucking-billion-to-the-moon loss? OF COURSE FUCKING NOT! THEY WILL GET EVERY FUCKING BAZOOKA, TANK, ROCKET or INTER-STELLAR DEFENSE SYSTEM IN PLACE TO BRING THIS TO AN END! Influence the market participants (speculation), Short-Laddar attacks (I to this very day haven’t understand the concept or how this works – speculation), demotivational tactics (speculation) and to whomever picks it up – desinformation (well not quite speculation but it could also be that media is just retarded as fuck to get the most simple facts straight). So what would you do with a potential group of 5mn small-size investors – shall we do a collective effort to think about it? Ah fuck it! It is to fucking obvious – you would dry this out through time, divide their interests and drive away their attention. Because let’s be fucking honest – most of you entered this thinking you would hold this wonderful stock for a couple of days (and to be honest in this respect the community how it existed 10 days ago was much more true to itself - no whining just sayin)! Gotcha! Who can tell me who fucked each other two weeks ago in People magazin or on Twitter? Nobody – I even don’t remember shit about this very forum before GME (ok I remember u/variation-separate but that is another story). And all their tactics are completely understandable because there is a fucking huge amount of tendies to be made and they are not that different from us (my fear).
4) That does not give you the fucking right to whine and bitch all the time in the daily threads (and it is not happening already its going to be) and fucking ruin the party
Deal with it – we just got to wait how this thing plays out. That’s it. If we are right – this will play out positively in one or another way (huge tendies or SEC investigating). Let them continue shorting the stock or whatever. If you believe you want to buy more stock – do your DD and do it. When this got picked up a long time ago by people they thought – hmmmm makes sense – I am going to get me one of these tickets to the moon. There was if at all a very little interest to squoze the balls of any HF and it was certainly not the main motivation of this sub. I said it above: Get rich or die tryin! Since last Thursday the whole thing became political and it looks like rules were changed in our disfavour and yeah we can not go back in time but we got to deal with it and the circumstances. [Left out this part as it promotes holding and buying which I don’t want to in the sense that everybody needs to make his own fucking decision but I am going to fucking hold] but WE NEED TO REGAIN OUR POSITIVE SPIRIT which was an essential part of this sub and GME for most part in January (and of course in general before) – no matter how fucked up things looked (individually as there is not such a thing as collective alignment to buy options or stocks on this forum). We will see how the numbers are play out and who provided the adequate picture. In our reality GME is going to the moon and the 🚀 is fueled. Period. We are just prevented from starting because of the windy conditions out there.
So please – no post without 🙌💎🙌💎🙌💎🚀🚀🚀 and if you want to fukn leave the party – leave – but let us continue this party, because we are going to the fkn moon. This is the way and I fkn love GME and if this means I need to hold onto this beauty for another 25 years I am going to do it.
P.S.: One thing dear to my heart - in the past there has been huge donations made by this community to people living with autism. As we use their names every fkn day I would really like to see some of your degenerates not to forget about this cause because we owe them and as much as I like the billboards I’d rather see every $$$ go into charities rather then telling the world about us – I think everybody out there knows by now that we exist and that we have 🙌💎
Edit: Nobody asked for it but 35@231,69 and thanks for the awards which should go to u/knutolee - so you can simply award his original post referenced. More importantly he expressed to me that he is very happy with the translation which is almost as important as the message itself.
Edit 2: Please pay attention to AMA Marc Cuban - https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/lawubt/hey_everyone_its_mark_cuban_jumping_on_to_do_an/ - there is I think some quite enlighting answers in a very easy to understand language.
Edit 3: Bought 5@103
Edit 4: Heading for dinner. Crazy times. Will check later and decide whether to buy more tickets or not. But maybe good advice for some others to make a break. Chillax :)
Edit 5: Read that RH has opened up GME again. For whatever it's worth 🚀
Edit 6: Thanks again for all the Awards and stuff. I can only reload in the morning. Was fun and maybe I am going to translate more in the future - if mods would consider to give me a copy cat 😺 flair it would be the icing on the cake.
Edit 7: Obligatory salute to the one and only DFV and his 💎 balls. This guy will go all the way to the 🚀 with us.

A friend of mine just sent this over to me. He's a noob and I'm a noob but in the true spirit of karma whoring for fake internet points I wanted to share and they said it's my funeral. Note we are both total retards, noobs and have no skin in the game cuz we too poor and can only afford plain popcorn, but we desperately want to see WSB succeed and Power to the Players! Do not take this as financial advice or god have mercy on your soul.
Uh guys… so we may see a crash that makes Enron look like a joke. There could be more than a short going on here, and more than firms pulling capital from other companies to cover.
I don’t mean to go all conspiracy theory on you, but hear me out.... I think everything is going so off-the-rails not because of the short, but because Vanguard, Fidelity and BlackRock have sold more stock than exists. This is illegal (duh) but it has happened lots of times in the past. In fact, we didn't have real laws against it until 2008. We may see some bizarre moves if WSB doesn't sell, because some people need to hide some crimes. No joke. Here's why I think this may be the case:
---------- The Background ----------
Read this first to understand how naked shorts work:
https://www.sec.gov/about/offices/ocie/options-trading-risk-alert.pdf
Basically, to short a stock, you must “borrow” the stock from another account, usually something like a margin account. This is something that typically the clearing house does on behest of the fund doing the shorting. Most people don’t even know when their shares are being borrowed by a hedge fund for the purposes of shorting.
A “naked short” is when you short a stock, but don’t confirm that the stock you are borrowing actually exists. This can happen when a clearing house either purposefully or inadvertently (ahem, sure) lends the same stock more than once. This basically clones the stock, just like an item cloning glitch in a video game. There are now two copies of the same stock in existence being actively traded… at least temporarily. Hold that thought.
Naked shorts can be devastating to the company being shorted, as not only do they lose liquidity because of the short, the cloned stocks serve to dilute the value of the real stocks being held by artificially increasing the number of stocks being traded. Especially for small companies doing initial investment rounds, this practically guarantees bankruptcy: the diluted value limits the amount of capital they can raise, as the company never sees the cash from the cloned stock.
Now, after the 2008 crash the SEC in theory made this illegal. Obviously, this practice kills companies if the short succeeds or destroys markets if the short doesn’t succeed. Either way, someone gets hurt.
HOWEVER, there’s a catch: Because hedge funds and clearing houses are permitted to operate behind closed doors, the SEC can only detect a naked short when a “failure to deliver” occurs. When someone calls the short, either because of a buy or because someone withdraws the right to loan their shares, the person shorting then has 3 days to deliver. If they can’t deliver the share (because it doesn’t exist) within 3 days, then this gets reported as a “failure to deliver”. Now, the SEC may look past a few of these because floats do happen, but too many and the SEC is obligated to open an investigation.
But of course, that never happens. The clearinghouse only has to report the net deliveries, not the actual transactions. This means that as long as there is someone buying on the day the failure-to-deliver would occur, the clearinghouse can roll the transaction forward… basically just like floating a check. The non-existent cloned stock is bought with the new buy, and the sell of real shares that should have covered that buy is left open but doesn’t need to be fulfilled for three more days. The clock resets. This is sort of like somebody-I-know used to do by floating checks back and forth between two different bank accounts: keeping the money in the air for several weeks until payday by continually writing checks to cover checks. Super unethical, but does work.
But, this can’t be continued indefinitely. There are SEC rules that make it tough to do this for longer than 21 days. IANAL, I don’t know every loophole, but that’s my understanding.
This is why after 2008 it became so important for the hedge fund to bankrupt the target company. If the company goes bankrupt, then the shares cease to be and the books never resolve. Even some kinds of restructuring can keep the books from resolving. It’s still possible to cover this without bankrupting the company if you can get enough people to sell, but it’s easier to crash the company and just make it all go away while pocketing cash from more shares than were ever real.
---------- The WSB Play ----------
Ok, now read this:
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4370860-gamestop-short-squeeze
This was basically the original WSB plan back from October. Don't worry about the plan... we know what's going on here already. Melvin Capital shorted by 140% which is more than the float. Gamestop had enough cash to cover debt so it seemed unlikely they would fail unless the hedge funds forced it to. Squeeze looks obvious when you lay it out that way.
BUT, there is one chart here that is super important when folks were trying to figure this out: look at the chart for institutional ownership!
https://i.imgur.com/Jh5AI8V.png
The top three names on that chart are Vanguard, Blackrock and Fidelity. As is suggested by the author, there is a strong likelihood that the top holders already loaned out all their shares to Melvin Capital. The shares had to come from somewhere, and this is the only place they could have come.
This is why some people thought this was a good move. Not just because there was a short, but because they could see that all the shares had already been “borrowed” which would force the hedge fund to buy at any price. There were simply no more shares available to option for any other kind of fuckery.
---------- The Expected Response ----------
Okay, so WSB made their move. And predictably Robinhood and a bunch of trading platforms cut the ability to buy GME. Seems obvious enough as a strategy to stem the bleeding, regardless of whether it is coming from Robinhood or, as they claim, the brokerage above them limiting trades for reasons. Whatever. Either way, this is an obvious response.
Likewise, there have been numerous pushes from the hedge funds to either convince WSB the positions are closed, or to convince them to change their position from GME to Silver.
Despite what the news is reporting, no one in WSB appears to be buying silver. Maybe someone is, but it ain’t them. I did a site-wide search for silver, then pulled the post history for all the accounts that made the posts--of which there are shockingly few compared to what the news media is implying. The only accounts promoting this appear to be mostly bots: they became reddit premium within the last week, or they are necro accounts that have no posts for two or three years until suddenly dozens of silver related posts in the last few days. Conversely, there are been numerous long standing accounts warning others that these silver posts are bots.
None of this is unexpected. Bots and media manipulation have been par for the course for political bullshit for the last few years.
Boots on the ground, I have literally no idea where the news media is getting this story other than a change in silver pricing. I am not seeing any such discussion in related communities, and certainly none that pre-dates the news stories! To be fair and avoid conspiracy: I don’t hang out on twitter. There are retail traders outside of Reddit, and perhaps the media is clumping multiple groups together and mistaking Twitter for Reddit. Wouldn’t be the first time. Even on 4chan /b/ is not /pol/ and so on. People make that mistake all the time, so the misrepresentation may be entirely unintentional. I know the internet is a weird weird place and not everyone gets how it works.
The last expected response is the fact that many of the hedge funds bought new short positions, especially assuming that most of Reddit would sell on Friday. (Which they did not) There are additional short positions held that expect WSB to fold within the next week. This coincides with the news reports expecting people to try to collect their profits. Of course, many people don't intend to do that. They aren't worried about the profits they want to see hedge funds go down.
But all this movement leads to an obvious question: If there are no shares available to borrow, then what are they borrowing against for the short??
---------- Clearing Houses are Sus ----------
Okay, soooo…. We expect Wall Street to prevent buying GME, which they have; and to unleash bots to change sentiment, which they have; and to promote news stories to try to change the situation, which they have.
BUT, with all of this, there are two retail trading platforms that are still allowing GME trades: Vanguard and Fidelity. There is also one firm that started buying GameStop themselves five days ago: BlackRock. Sound like a familiar list?????? These are the firms that held the shares that the hedge funds were borrowing against to short.
Now, if all the funds are trying to stop the bleeding, WHY would these firms still allow trading when no one else is… much less start buying themselves?
Unless…. The shares DON’T EXIST.
You can’t float a check between two accounts without writing another check. Someone needs to buy the shares in order to push the failure-to-deliver of the non-existent cloned stock into the future, otherwise the gig is up and the SEC finds out. If Vanguard and Fidelity become the only source for Redditors to buy from, then they can keep moving the doomsday clock forward. BlackRock can do the same thing by buying the stock themselves. Not as good a position, but not a lot of other choice if they need the books to read clean. Ok, someone with more experience than me can surely explain this better as there are some gotchas, but that's the basic gist.
More proof those shares don’t exist? This academic paper from last year gives a clue:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3673531
Even if you own shares, you can’t vote in a shareholder’s meeting if your shares have been loaned out. Less than half of GameStop shareholders were eligible to vote by April of last year, with even fewer by August! There were so many shares borrowed SIX MONTHS AGO that it was affecting GameStop’s ability to hold a quorum among shareholders.
Now the paper was only concerned about how short selling was affecting company’s ability to administer. The idea that these were naked shorts never came up AFAIK. But knowing what we do now, this seems increasingly likely.
Also, for good measure beyond academia, this was in the news from last year:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-investing-giants-gave-away-voting-power-ahead-of-a-shareholder-fight-11591793863
If you look at the volume that WSB has bought since then, and the amount held in options, and the amount of shares that have been borrowed against in the last week or two as hedge funds have placed a second set of shorts… well… it sure looks like there are way more shares on the market THAN EXIST. Of course, without having the records from the clearing houses, AFAIK there's no way to know for sure. Only the SEC can do that.
I don’t mean the bet WSB played… that Marvin had 140% of the FLOAT. I mean that Vanguard, Fidelity and BlackRock have sold more than the TOTAL SHARES that EXIST.
That's a completely different problem and it's punishable by jail time. Not a joke. It's basically counterfeiting stock shares, although that's not the terminology used. If this is true, who knows how many other times they’ve done this. Or maybe it's not true, and they just really like the stock??? If BlackRock started buying five days ago, and the longest they can likely do this is 21 days, then the doomsday clock doesn’t run out until at least February 17th. If Wall Street can get WSB to sell before then, then they won’t get caught and won’t go to jail. But if they don’t…. well, this will make Enron look like chump change.
If enough people hold until the end of February, and this is truly the situation, then there is a chance that major parts of Wall Street are going to IMPLODE.
---------- The Conclusion ----------
Apes need diamond hands until the end of February in order to get the SEC involved, most likely somewhere between Feb 17th - 19th. Whether or not this will happen is anybody's guess, but if it does all heck may break loose!
Wall Street will probably do everything in their power to prevent that. There are too many top players involved. Crazy moves are likely because stock brokers are smooshy and jail is uncomfortable.
This may effect the market. (Duh) Bloomberg may be correct, but not at all for the reasons stated. But, that said, I wouldn't panic if it does. I think it will be fine in the long run, but that's a whole other set of reasoning for another day.
Standard Disclaimer: This is not financial or legal advice. I am a retard and I have no idea what I am talking about. This is entirely speculation. :)
Edit: here is the link to my second attempt to post to WSB, maybe a mod can reverse the removal? The post still shows listed on my end: https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/la9ms9/follow_the_crumbs_gme_exposed_the_meta/
Edit 2: Ok so don't ask me for stock advice. I don't know stocks and neither does my friend. We both think holding is the right move but beyond that we don't know and could even be wrong about that. And furthermore I don't want this to come off like we're accusing these companies of nefarious deeds. We don't know what is going on. The data is sus. The activities are sus. Google is your friend and the post tries to list sources for the research. Do your own research though! For ducks sake this is a rando post on UserSub. I'm happy to see the love but this is a one shot research dump by someone who knows nothing about this topic.
Edit 3: u/traveljg has commented that Blackrock is on the record for selling not buying but I don't know enough about any of this to challenge the idea one way or another and my friend is off on some other crusade at this point so he's worthless for questions. This is why it is SUPER important that you do your own research and not take advice from a rando.
Edit 4: I'm not responding to chat requests. If you have comments make them on the post. What is wrong with you retards?

First of all, I can't wait to be berated in the comments.
I'm gonna be blunt, I have seen a whole lot of dumb shit over the last week. A lot more than normal. And compounding all of that is an unprecedented amount of legitimate emotional involvement here. So let me get started by saying outright that people getting emotionally involved with trading stocks always lose. Short, long, whatever. It doesn't matter if you're a 19 year old throwing in your life savings or Bill fucking Ackman not being able to admit he was wrong with Herbalife. Letting your emotions be a major factor in trading is a fantastic way to lose money.
And a whole lot of you are really emotionally involved with this GME, AMC, whatever.
To the point: I am not making a buy/sell/hold/whatever recommendation. I have no special insight in to what's happening with GME or whatever else. What I can tell you is that it is for sure not worth $300.
So let's dispel one quick thing: this is not David vs Goliath. It also isn't the little man vs hedge funds or WSB vs big finance. It might have started out that way, but if you only read one thing read this:

Many of the big retail brokerages, including Robinhood, route a lot of their customer orders to Citadel Securities, so it ends up seeing a large percentage of retail trades in U.S. stocks. It can see if retail traders are mostly buying or mostly selling or mostly pretty balanced. You might expect—I certainly expected—to see that retail traders were buying more than they were selling this week. The stock seemed to be rocketing up on frenzied retail sentiment, and the posters on WallStreetBets were all claiming that they would never sell and keep buying until it hit $1,000.
But here’s what Citadel Securities’ retail flow looked like in GameStop this week: 1
Graphic here
Retail investors were net buyers on Monday but net sellers for the rest of the week (through yesterday), and all in all quite balanced: About 49.8% of retail orders (that Citadel Securities saw) were to buy, and 50.2% were to sell.
What do you make of that? One reading would be: “Retail investors on Reddit might have started the GameStop rally, but they’re not piling into this stock now, and the price action this week is coming from professionals.” Or as one Twitter user put it, “past the retail ignition, the rocket ship was mostly intra-fast money warfare.”

So, just to be clear about this, there is massive institutional money on both sides of this trade, and retail is a toddler sitting at the world series of poker.
Understand that melvin does not need to cover in the way a retail trader needs to cover. You, and everyone else, have no idea what Melvin's position looks like, and they can reorganize and exit a position before you ever knew it happened. You don't know how hedged they are, you don't know what their collateral looks like, and you don't know if they've covered and restructured a short at last week's prices. You simply don't know. You only know what's been presented in the news, which is almost certainly bullshit.
This thing could come to an end as fast as it started and you won't know what happened for weeks. You might go take a shit at 1pm today and come back to GME trading at $16 because Ken Griffin got on CNBC and announced they restructured their short at an average price of $200, and were happy to sit on it. Make no mistake, you'll get kicked in the nuts and have your ball taken away faster than you can comprehend.
Emotions The problem with this whole "strike back at wall street" narrative is that lots of you are getting really worked up over this trade. Losing money sucks, but losing money and feeling like you got shit on by the big guy is going to hurt. This isn't a moral crusade to them, it's 25 billion dollars. So if you're out here putting money and emotions on the line that you can't afford to lose there won't be a happy ending.
Want to fight the good fight against wall street? Write your congressman, Tweet AOC or Ted Cruz, get you a fucking picket sign and go wave it around on the streeet. But dropping money on GME that you need in life ain't gonna change anything except your net worth.
TLDR:
1) know and understand who is playing this game. And that they have access to tools, leverage, and markets that you do not. You're playing Le Chiffre at Casino Royale right now, you might think you're James Bond but there's a good chance that you're just the fat dude in the corner.
2) Short squeezes end fast. As fast as they started. If you're new to trading then understand buying GME at this price can mean all of your money will evaporate before you had time to make a TikTock about it.
3) Get your emotions out of play here. This whole nonsense political narrative is only going to cause you to make trading mistakes. Can't handle that? then maybe it's not a good idea to sit at this table.
Lastly, if you really just can't get yourself out of the whole "fight the hedge funds" nonsense, at least understand that you're spending money that you likely won't get back. If that's worth it to you then have at it. But don't fool yourself in to thinking otherwise.
E: Completely unrelated: I hate reddit awards, reddit doesn't need your money. Go buy like a hundredth of a share of VTI or something.

I've been a member of this sub since we were at 400k subscribers
I'm known for never getting the fuck off this sub and collecting tax payer money as I do it. Seriously you'll see me here 24 fucking 7 even when I'm "working"
I'm going to give you the quick rundown on Wallstreetbets culture for you newcomers to get acclimated or if you're a CNBC boomer not knowing what the fuck is going on in this sub.

First of all lets go over lingo/slang:

FD (stands for "f" word (no not fuck the other F word) delight)
-To buy an FD is to buy a weekly option that is so fucking retarded it might just work
Retard
-It means your fucking stupid and don't know what the fuck you're doing
Autistic
-Use autistic to describe someone that actually does due diligence and knows what they are doing
First one is free
-A phenomena where you are so retarded and don't know what the fuck your doing you somehow make money on your first trade
Ban
-When you say or ask something so fucking retarded someone has requested a mod to ban you
Diamond Hands 💎✋
-It means you never sell. Your hands are literally made of diamonds
Toilet Paper Hands 🧻✋
-You sell at the slightest red tick because you're overleveraged and are a pussy.
In Scrambles
-when somebody has made a poor decision and is regretting it
Europoors
-When the European stock markets open up and they start selling because they lack economic stimulus.
Ameririch
-When US stock markets open and they buy up what Europoors sold
YOLO
-$400 into GME weeklies is not a YOLO you dumb fuck. A YOLO should be atleast 4 digits and represent 98-100% of your account
$ROPE
-what you buy when you make a poor decision
Smooth Brain
-apparently the grooves in your brain determines your intelligence. To have a smooth brain means to have no grooves which means you're fucking retarded.
FOMO (fear of missing out)
-when everybody getting paid and you feel left out.
Guh
-when you account goes from $4000 to $0 in 30 seconds
DD (Due Diligence)
-It means doing your homework on a specific stock or the overall market
BTFD (Buy the Fucking Dip)
-Something Warren Buffet said
Plunge Protection Team (PPT)
-When the money printer gets turned on and prevents a drill from drilling further
Tendies
-money
Mooning 🚀🚀🚀
-Either means a stock went up 0.05% or 600%
Drilling / Drill team 6
-Either means a stock went down -0.05% or -50%
Pleas fly again
-what you say when your stock takes a shit
"We like the stock"
-Recent meme popularized by Jim Cramer in regards to Gamestop when he tried to imitate Wallstreetbets users
Jerome Powell / Daddy
-The chairman of the Federal Reserve. Blessed us with 0% interest rates causing stocks to only go up. Literally prints money.
SEC (Securities exchange commission)
-Stock market police
Black Swan
-when your chillin and some shit pops off that makes the stock market moon or drill
Deepfuckingvalue
-Autist who held GME for nearly 2 years
Mods are gay
-self explanatory
Buy High Sell low
-what you do as a newcomer.
​
No you don't need to report users who call you retarded.
No you don't need to report users that say they fucked your wife while her boyfriend watches
No you don't need to report users for saying you probably do blowjobs behind the wendys.
If somebody says "nobody tell him" they are not being a dick you are just so fucking retarded because your question is probably basic shit you should know before investing.

Gang Life

On your adventure throughout Wallstreetbets you'll notice some retards representing different types of "gangs" heres a quick guide to what they stand for.
Bear Gang / Gay bears / Virgin traders 🌈🐻
-These guys get hard when stocks go down
Note: "gay bear" in NOT an alternative to calling someone "retard". Being called gay bear is 100x worse, true story.
Bull Gang / Big Dongus Crew 🐂
-These guys get hard when stocks go up
Kang Gang 🦘
-These guys get hard when stocks go way up and then way down
Theta Gang θ
-These guys get hard when stocks go sideways
Cash gang 💵
-These guys get hard watching other people get hard
Late-night gang
-Any retard on wallstreetbets between the hours of 1am pst / 4am est - 4am pst / 7am est
West coast gang
-Usually a chad who lives in California or Washington. Heavy presence between 12am pst and 4am pst
East coast gang
-Losers that have to wake up at 4 in the morning to look at the pre-market
Pajama Traders
-Usually references people who trade futures or those that trade premarket
Silver Surfers 🏄
-People that invest in silver commodity
Steel Gang
-People that invest in Vale, X or other stocks that go up when steel is in demand
Corn Gang🌽
-People that invest in corn
Gourd Gang
-People that invest in Gourd
Tanker Gang🛢️
-People that invest in tankers. rip.

Surviving as a newcomer

Don't ask retarded questions that are basic such as:

• "What is an option?"
• "Should I buy X stock?"
• "Is it too late?"
• "What is IV?"
• "Why can't I trade" and the market is fucking closed
• "What are futures?"

All this basic shit will piss off some degenerates because if you don't know any of this there is really no reason for you to be throwing 10k at weeklies you'll lose 99% of the time.
​
Not only is it against the rules but nobody gives a fuck about your political thoughts. The only thing we care about on this sub is fucking gay bears and losing money. With this much people in a sub there is bound to be political commentary and I'd advise you to take it to a different sub.
​
TL;DR: This sub was created to lose money. Nothing here is financial advice.
-edit: some letter may be missing on mobile, shits fucked yo.

NOTE (cuz of comments): This is not about graphics but more about core gameplay!
I love this franchise so much but when I first played Sword/Shield, I was disappointed. I tried to enjoy certain aspects of the game but it just didn't feel the same anymore, it lost so much of that personality and I feel like there is not much passion from the development. I hate saying this about one of my favorite franchises, so I gave it a second chance and replayed it... it didn't change my mind. GameFreak might've been doing justice for the franchise in the past, but when it comes to this modern era, they clearly fail to meet expectations or even minimum standards. If we look at other games that look incredible on Switch, it clearly shows that GameFreak can do better but maybe it's because they don't have enough time? Or because the development is quite small? I honestly don't know why they don't employ more when they are making games for the largest media franchise?
Who do you think would be suitable to make future mainline Pokemon games?
I think of a few like Square Enix, just look at how incredible Dragon Quest 11 S is. The game itself is amazing on any platform, but the fact that we got such a masterpiece on Switch! It's beautiful and runs great! Square Enix is obviously well-known for their RPGs so I think they would make a great Pokemon game.
What about Level-5? The Ni No Kuni games are great but the fact that the first one is on Switch and looks a lot better than Sword/Shield... it's not even the remastered version. If you've played the first Ni No Kuni, you probably thought of Pokemon as well, the games are quite similar in many ways.
We know Bandai Namco has given us beautiful visuals for Pokemon (Pokken and Snap) but when it comes to proper RPG elements, we can look at their Tales Of Franchise. If you haven't played them, they're great!
Another great team - Monolith Soft. Just thinking about it gives me goosebumps... just imagine a proper 'Pokemon roaming in the wild' experience. We want to see Pokemon interacting in their habitats the way they're supposed to and when you think of the Xenoblade games, you know that it's possible.
I was actually discussing this on a Discord server and some people were saying "Why not Nintendo handle it themselves?" How awesome would that be!? Pokemon has SO MUCH potential but with the way GameFreak has been handling things for the past few years, it seems like it won't please the majority. Mario and Zelda are getting more innovative with their games but Nintendo's biggest franchise is just going downhill (obviously not in sales but you get what I mean). Of course, it's 'Pokemon' were talking about, it will obviously sell whether they put effort or not, we all know that.
EDIT: After reading very interesting comments, I agree that GameFreak should still communicate with the (hypothetically) new team. They can help with other things like designs, stats, music, and so on.
2ND EDIT: Saw one guy say this and it's so true!! - Why does a AAA first party Nintendo game from their most popular franchise of a $95 billion company get excused so easily for being so goddamn awful?
3RD EDIT: Seeing a lot of Atlus mentions, and hell yeah! I love their games and they've done a lot of things similar to Pokemon games. They are definitely capable of delivering.
4TH EDIT: For those who wonder why I posted this, it’s because I felt like it was an important topic that could start an interesting discussion (what dev team could help the franchise). I barely post on Reddit but my experience with this franchise just really made me want to speak out. I was not trying to make a ‘hate post’ towards GameFreak, or try to get people to trashtalk the team. I wanted to open a discussion regarding the possibilities of new developers to work on Pokemon.
5TH EDIT: This rotation system that people mentioned, how COD was developed by different teams. That’s something Pokemon should have. It would be a great opportunity for more games to be developed simultaneously by different teams, and with more time of course. GameFreak has a tight schedule, they need to find some kind of solution and the rotation is perfect.

Okay, I realize the title sounds awful, but I think context is super important here.
I play World of Wacraft: Classic. In this game, you get a group of 40 people together to kill bosses in a joint effort, and when the bosses die they drop items that your characters can use. It's called raiding. Each boss can only be killed once a week, so once a week my guild and I get together to raid.
An aspect of World of Wacraft: Classic is something called World Buffs. These are stat increases you can get for your character in order to make them do more damage, have more health, regenerate more mana, etc. And they are a real bitch to get. They occur all over the very large game world, on set schedules, and at very specific times. For example, one of the buffs is on a 7ish hour cooldown and can only be given when one person turns in the head of a slain dragon (and this can only be done once per character). Coordinating World Buffs is so intense and ridiculous there are entire discord servers that exist simply to let people know when they are going to happen.
What this means is that in order to prepare for a raid, I have to spend a significant amount of time collecting these buffs for my character - and our raid leader (the guy in charge) requires them in order to get an invitation to the raid. Oh, and if you die, that's it, you lose them.
Onto what happened. My wife and I live in a major city, and had ordered food delivery. Our building is small (only one other unit) and it has a vestibule of the kind where if a door closes behind you, it locks. Typically, when we order delivery and the doorbell rings, I go downstairs to collect the food. But, on the night in question we were preparing for a particularly difficult boss encounter (they last ~5-7 minutes). If you don't do the mechanics properly, you will die and lose your buffs, and potentially cause all 39 other players to die, too.
So, right as we start the encounter, the doorbell rings and she goes downstairs to get the food. As she was leaving I told her to not forget her keys, but she did. So, after collecting the food she was stuck in the vestibule with no way back into the apartment.
Here's where I might be the asshole: This happens occasionally (hence why I told her to not forget her keys) - when it does, my wife rings the doorbell in order to let me know she's stuck. On this occasion when the doorbell rang, I ignored it until the boss encounter was over - perhaps 5 minutes or so.
She was really, really upset and told me I was a huge asshole and that I was choosing video games over her, but she also knows that there is a huge time investment leading up to that 5 minute encounter. It's not like she was unsafe (the front door was locked), and it wasn't cold in there. She just had to wait 5 minutes, and then I went and got her.
So Reddit, AITA?
​
EDIT: Well, this looks to be a tremendously controversial topic. I want to address some of the common questions:
"Why did you spend so much time talking about the game and not your wife?" - This is not a signal that I don't love my wife, or that I think the game is more important than her. I believed (and still believe) that the context of the situation is important here. If you aren't going to read through that explanation and snap judge me, you can fuck right off.
"Have you ever fought about this before?"
- No, not once
"How much time do you spend playing the game outside of the raids?"
- Raid times are 2-3 hours once a week, and I probably play another 5 or so hours during the week to prepare materials, get the buffs I talked about, etc. All of this usually happens when she is doing her own hobby
"Was she unsafe/uncomfortable?"
- Not in the least. The vestibule is climate controlled, we know the other couple who live here, the front door was locked (from the outside -- she could have gone outside if she needed to, and this is how she used the doorbell), and she doesn't get claustrophobic or anxious
"Why couldn't you just hit your buzzer to let her back in?"
- Our building doesn't have a buzzer. This is why she had to go downstairs in the first place. I would have had to go down both flights of stairs to get her, then back up - which would 100% have caused me to die (and maybe others)

Reposting with some updates:
Buckle up, folks. This is going to be one hell of a ride.
I work in an inpatient psychiatric hospital. 90% of the time, psych hospitals are nothing like the movies. Even the psychotic patients are generally pretty harmless and mostly just talk to themselves and pace around.
This story is about one of the outliers.
The worst patients are the ones who are pretty much just here because they are high off their ass and might be a danger to themselves as they come down. This guy was blitzed off his ass on K2 and very aggressive from the start.
He came to us from a regular hospital after having surgery. He had a big incision in his stomach with staples. Because he was so aggressive and demonstrated self harm (picking at his incision, biting himself) he was put on a 1:1 protocol meaning someone has to be within arms length of him at all times. I did that from for two hours with no incident and then someone else took over.
At about 12:30am, this guy, who had been sleeping, started screaming in his room. We rushed to investigate and he was hitting himself and ripping at his incisions. He was spouting all kinds of crazy crap that didn’t really make sense.
You can’t just sedate a patient, it has to be ordered by a physician. Since this is the night shift, there is no doctor in the building, just nurses and CNAs. We have to call the doctor (wake him up in the middle of the night, very grumpy) and get an order to sedate him. We call for backup from the Sheriffs on duty who provide security for the building and then get ready to sedate him. I realize that I don’t have a hair tie. I hair is long and down. Best case scenario: it’ll be in my face. Worst case scenario: the patient can grab me and hurt me.
We walk into the room and are hit by this awful shit smell. He's smeared it on the floor, the walls, everywhere.
There he stands, naked as the day he was born, shit all over his arms and legs. We can’t worry about that too much right now, there are more pressing matters. I gag a bit. We line up, ready to hold him. I’m a small woman so I’m a little intimidated at the prospect of trying to restrain this big dude, but nonetheless I prepare myself.
And then all he'll breaks loose. Hands and elbows are flying, everyone is grunting and straining, and we are failing miserably to get this guy under control. We can hold him for a second but not long enough to do the injection. While all this is going on, he is dragging everyone through his shit, smearing what's on him on us, and trying to bite us. Eventually, he does make purchase on my ear and I recoil briefly in pain before getting back in the thick of it. The two sheriffs eventually get some handcuffs on him and then we bring him to the ground. Because he bit me (and assaulted everyone really), they place him under arrest. His incision opened up so he was bleeding a bit from his surgical wound. We hold him like that for an hour and a half waiting for more law enforcement to arrive to transport him to jail.
I still have no idea what took them so damn long, but restraining him was exhausting, even with him in handcuffs. Every. Single. One of us. Was covered in his shit. It was on my shoes, my scrubs, my hair, it was awful. We just had to deal with it though. After he was hauled off to jail (still naked, still covered in shit), we mopped the room and tried to clean ourselves up as much as possible. I spent the rest of my shift (6 hours) wearing patient scrubs which are made out of paper. So that sucked.
Today (the next day) he is BACK at our psych unit because he was declared incompetent so he can’t be charged. At least he’s wearing clothes now.
TLDR: I had to wrestled a naked man covered in his own shit and high off his ass. I didn’t have my hair put up, so he pulled my hair and bit my ear AND I got shit all over me (and my hair).

Disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor. This entire post represents my personal views and opinions, and should not be taken as financial advice (or advice of any kind whatsoever). I encourage you to do your own research, take anything I write with a grain of salt, and hold me accountable for any mistakes you may catch. Also, full disclosure, I hold a net long position in GME, but my cost basis is very low (average ~$67--I have to admit, the drop today was too tasty so my cost basis went up from yesterday)/share with my later buys averaged in), and I'm using money I can absolutely lose. My capital at risk and tolerance for risk generally is likely substantially different than yours. In this post I will go a little further and speculate more than I'd normally do in a post due to the questions I've been getting, so fair warning, some of it might be very wrong. I suspect we'll learn some of the truth years from now when some investigative journalist writes a book about it.
Thank you everyone for the comments and questions on the first and second post on this topic.
Today was a study in the power of fear, courage, and the levers you can pull when you wield billions of dollars...
Woops, excuse me. I'm sorry hedge fund guys... I meant trillions of dollars--I just briefly forget you control not just your own but a lot of other peoples' money too for a moment there.
Also, for people still trading this on market-based rationale (as I am), it was a good day to measure the conviction behind your thesis. I like to think I have conviction, but in case you are somehow not yet familiar with the legend of DFV, you need to see these posts (fair warning, nsfw, and some may be offended/triggered by the crude language). The last two posts might be impressive, but you should follow it in chronological order and pay attention to the evolution of sentiment in the comments to experience true enlightenment.
Anyway, I apologize, but this post will be very long--there's just a lot to unpack.

Pre-Market

Disclaimer: given yesterday's pre-market action I didn't even pay attention to the screen until near retail pre-market. I'm less confident in my ability to read what's going on in a historical chart vs the feel I get watching live, but I'll try.
Early in the pre-market it looks to me like some momentum traders are taking profit, discounting the probability that the short-side will give them a deep discount later, which you can reasonably assume given the strategy they ran yesterday. If they're right they can sell some small volume into the pre-market top, wait for the hedge funds try to run the price back down, and then lever up the gains even higher buying the dip. Buy-side here look to me like people FOMOing and YOLOing in at any price to grab their slice of gainz, or what looks to be market history in the making. No way are short-side hedge funds trying to cover anything at these prices.
Mark Cuban--well said! Free markets baby!
Mohamed El-Erian is money in the bank as always. "upgrade in quality" on the pandemic drop was the best, clearest actionable call while most were at peak panic, and boy did it print. Your identifying the bubble as the excessive short (vs blaming retail activity) is money yet again. Also, The PAIN TRADE (sorry, later interview segment I only have on DVR, couldn't find on youtube--maybe someone else can)!
The short attack starts, but I'm hoping no one was panicking this time--we've seen it before. Looks like the momentum guys are minting money buying the double dip into market open.
CNBC, please get a good market technician to explain the market action. Buy-side dominance, sell-side share availability evaporating into nothing (look at day-by-day volume last few days), this thing is now at runaway supercritical mass. There is no changing the trajectory unless you can change the very fabric of the market and the rules behind it (woops, I guess I should have knocked on wood there).
If you know the mechanics, what's happening in the market with GME is not mysterious AT ALL. I feel like you guys are trying to scare retail out early "for their own good" (with all sincerity, to your credit) rather than explain what's happening. Possibly you also fear that explaining it would equate to enabling/encouraging people to keep trying to do it inappropriately (possibly fair point, but at least come out and say that if that's the case). Outside the market, however...wow.

You Thought Yesterday Was Fear? THIS is Fear!

Ok short-side people, my hat is off to you. Just when I thought shouting fire in a locked theater was fear mongering poetry in motion, you went and took it to 11. What's even better? Yelling fire in a theater with only one exit. That way people can cause the financial equivalent of stampede casualties. Absolutely brilliant.
Robin Hood disables buying of GME, AMC, and a few of the other WSB favorites. Other brokerages do the same. Even for people on 0% margin. Man, and here I thought I had seen it all yesterday.
Side note: I will give a shout out to TD Ameritrade. You guys got erroneously lumped together with RH during an early CNBC segment, but you telegraphed the volatility risk management changes and gradually ramped up margin requirements over the past week. No one on your platform should have been surprised if they were paying attention. And you didn't stop anyone from trading their own money at any point in time. My account balance thanks you. I heard others may have had problems, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt given the DDOS attacks that were flyiing around
Robin Hood. Seriously WTF. I'm sure it was TOTALLY coincidence that your big announcements happen almost precisely when what has to be one of the best and most aggressive short ladder attacks of all time starts painting the tape, what looked like a DDOS attack on Reddit's CDN infrastructure (pretty certain it was the CDN because other stuff got taken out at the same time too), and a flood of bots hit social media (ok, short-side, this last one is getting old).
Taking out a large-scale cloud CDN is real big boy stuff though, so I wouldn't entirely rule out nation state type action--those guys are good at sniffing out opportunities to foment social unrest.
Anyway, at this point, as the market dives, I have to admit I was worried for a moment. Not that somehow the short-side would win (hah! the long-side whales in the pond know what's up), but that a lot of retail would get hurt in the action. That concern subsided quite a bit on the third halt on that slide. But first...
A side lesson on market orders
Someone printed bonus bank big time (and someone lost--I feel your pain, whoever you are).
During the face-ripping volatility my play money account briefly ascended to rarified heights of 7 figures. It took me a second to realize it, then another second to process it. Then, as soon as it clicked, that one, glorious moment in time was gone.
What happened?
During the insane chop of the short ladder attack, someone decided to sweep the 29 Jan 21 115 Call contracts, but they couldn't get a grip on the price, which was going coast to coast as IV blew up and the price was being slammed around. So whoever was trying to buy said "F it, MARKET ORDER" (i.e. buy up to $X,XXX,XXX worth of contracts at any price). This is referred to as a sweep if funded to buy all/most of the contracts on offer (HFT shops snipe every contract at each specific price with a shotgun of limit orders, which is far safer, but something only near-market compute resources can do really well). For retail, or old-tech pros, if you want all the contracts quickly, you drop a market order loaded with big bucks and see what you get... BUT, some clever shark had contracts available for the reasonable sum of... $4,400, or something around that. I was too stunned to grab a screencap. The buy market order swept the book clean and ran right into that glorious, nigh-obscene backstop limit. So someone got nearly $440,000 PER CONTRACT that was, at the time theoretically priced at around $15,000. $425,000 loss... PER CONTRACT. Maybe I'm not giving the buyer enough credit.. you can get sniped like that even if you try to do a safety check of the order book first, but, especially in low liquidity environments, if a HFT can peak into your order flow (or maybe just observes a high volume of sweeps occurring), they can end up front running your sweep, pick off the reasonable contracts, and slam a ridiculous limit sell order into place before your order makes it to the exchange. Either way, I hope that sweep wasn't loaded for bear into the millions. If so... OUCH. Someone got cleaned out.
So, the lesson here folks... in a super high volatility, low-liquidity market, a market order will just run up the ladder into the first sell order it can find, and some very brutal people will put limit sells like that out there just in case they hit the jackpot. And someone did. If you're on the winning side, great. It can basically bankrupt you if you're on the losing side. My recommendation: Just don't try it. I wouldn't be surprised if really shady shenanigans were involved in this, but no way to know (normally that's crazy-type talk, but after today....peeking at order flow and sniping sweeps is one of the fastest, most financially devastating ways to bleed big long-side players, just sayin').
edit *so while I was too busy trying not to spit out my coffee to grab a screenshot, piddlesthethug was faster on the draw and captured this: https://imgur.com/gallery/RI1WOuu
Ok, so I guess my in-the-moment mental math was off by about 10%. Man, that hurts just thinking about the guy who lost on that trade.*
Back to the market action..

A Ray of Light Through the Darkness

So I was worried watching the crazy downward movement for two different reasons.
On the one hand, I was worried the momentum pros would get the best discounts on the dip (I'll admit, I FOMO'd in too early, unnecessarily raising my cost basis).
On the other hand, I was worried for the retail people on Robin Hood who might be bailing out into incredibly steep losses because they had only two options: Watch the slide, or bail. All while dealing with what looked to me like a broad-based cloud CDN outage as they tried to get info from WSB HQ, and wondering if the insta-flood of bot messages were actually real people this time, and that everyone else was bailing on them to leave them holding the bag.
But I saw the retail flag flying high on the 3rd market halt (IIRC), and I knew most would be ok. What did I see, you ask? Why, the glorious $211.00 / $5,000 bid/ask spread. WSB Reddit is down? Those crazy mofos give you the finger right on the ticker tape. I've been asked many times in the last few hours about why I was so sure shorts weren't covering on the down move. THIS is how I knew. For sure. It's in the market data itself.
edit So, there's feedback in the comments that this is likely more of a technical glitch. Man, at least it was hilarious in the moment. But also now I know maybe not to trust price updates when the spread between orders being posted is so wide. Maybe a technical limitation of TOS
I'll admit, I tried to one-up those bros with a 4206.90 limit sell order, but it never made it through. I'm impressed that the HFT guys at the hedge fund must have realized really quickly what a morale booster that kind of thing would have been, and kept a lower backstop ask in place almost continuously from then on I'm sure others tried the same thing. Occasionally $1,000 and other high-dollar asks would peak through from time to time from then on, which told me the long-side HFTs were probably successfully sniping the backstops regularly.
So, translating for those of you who found that confusing. First, such a high ask is basically a FU to the short-side (who, as you remember, need to eventually buy shares to cover their short positions). More importantly, as an indicator of retail sentiment, it meant that NO ONE ELSE WAS TRYING TO SELL AT ANY PRICE LOWER THAN $5,000. Absolutely no one was bailing out.
I laughed for a minute, then started getting a little worried. Holy cow.. NO retail selling into the fear? How are they resisting that kind of price move??
The answer, as we all know now... they weren't afraid... they weren't even worried. They were F*CKING PISSED.
Meanwhile the momentum guys and long-side HFTs keep gobbling up the generously donated shares that the short-side are plowing into their ladder attack. Lots of HFT duels going on as long-side HFTs try to intercept shares meant to travel between short-side HFT accounts for their ladder. You can tell when you see prices like $227.0001 constantly flying across the tape. Retail can't even attempt to enter an order like that--those are for the big boys with privileged low-latency access.
The fact that you can even see that on the tape with human eyes is really bad for the short-side people.
Why, you ask? Because it means liquidity is drying up, and fast.

The Liquidity Tide is Flowing Out Quickly. Who's Naked (short)?

Market technicals time. I still wish this sub would allow pictures so I could throw up a chart, but I guess a table will do fine.
​

Date	Volume	Price at US Market Close
Friday, 1/22/21	197,157,196	$65.01
Monday, 1/25/21	177,874,00	$76.79
Tuesday, 1/26/21	178,587,974	$147.98
Wednesday, 1/27/21	93,396,666	$347.51
Thursday, 1/28/21	58,815,805	$193.60

What do I see? I see the shares available to trade dropping so fast that all the near-exchange compute power in the world won't let the short-side HFTs maintain order flow volume for their attacks. Many retail people asking me questions thought today was the heaviest trading. Nope--it was just the craziest.
What about the price dropping on Thursday? Is that a sign that the short-side pulled a miracle out and pushed price down against a parabolic move on even less volume than Wednesday? Is the long side running out of capital?
Nope. It means the short-side hedge funds are just about finished.
But wait, I thought the price needed to be higher for them to be taken out? How is it that price being lower is bad for them? Won't that allow them to cover at a lower price?
No, the volume is so low that they can't cover any meaningful fraction of their position without spiking the price parabolic almost instantly. Just not enough shares on offer at reasonable prices (especially when WSB keeps flashing you 6942.00s).
It's true, a higher price hurts, but the interest charge for one more day is just noise at this point. The only tick that will REALLY count is the last tick of trading on Friday.
In the meantime, the price drop (and watching the sparring in real time) tells me that the long-side whales and their HFT quants are so certain of the squeeze that they're no longer worried AT ALL about whether it will happen, and they aren't even worried at all about retail morale to help carry the water anymore.
Instead, they're now really, really worried about how CHEAPLY they can make it happen.
They are wondering if they can't edge out just a sliver more alpha out of what will already be a blow-out trade for the history books (probably). You see, to make it happen they just have to keep hoovering up shares. It doesn't matter what those shares cost. If you're certain that the squeeze is now locked in, why push the price up and pay more than you have to? Just keep pressing hard enough to force short-side to keep sending those tasty shares your way, but not so much you move the price. Short-side realizes this and doesn't try to drive price down too aggressively. They can't afford to let price run away, so they have to keep some pressure on at the lowest volume they can manage, but they don't want to push down too hard and give the long-side HFTs too deep of a discount and bleed their ammo out even faster. That dynamic keeps price within a narrow (for GME today, anyway) trading range for the rest of the day into the close.
Good plan guys, but those after market people are pushing the price up again. Damnit WSB bros and Euros, you're costing those poor long-side whales their extra 0.0000001% of alpha on this trade just so you can run up your green rockets... See, that's the kind of nonsense that just validates Lee Cooperman's concerns.
On a totally unrelated note, I have to say that I appreciate the shift in CNBC's reporting. Much more thoughtful and informed. Just please get a good market technician in there who will be willing to talk about what is going on under the hood if possible. A lot of people watching on the sidelines are far more terrified than they need to be because it all looks random to them. And they're worried that you guys look confused and worried--and if the experts on the news are worried....??!
You should be able to find one who has access to the really good data that we retailers can only guess at, who can explain it to us unwashed masses.

Ok, So.. Questions

There is no market justification for this. How can you tell me is this fundamentally sound and not just straight throwing money away irresponsibly?? (side note: not that that should matter--if you want to throw your money away why shouldn't you be allowed to?)
We're not trading in your securities pricing model. This isn't irrational just because your model says long and short positions are the same thing. The model is not a real market. There is asymmetrical counterparty risk here given the shorts are on the hook for all the money they have, and possibly all the money their brokers have, and possibly anyone with exposure to the broker too! You may want people to trade by the rules you want them to follow. But the rest of us trade in the real market as it is actually implemented. Remember? That's what you tell the retailers who take their accounts to zero. Remember what you told the KBIO short-squeezed people? They had fair warning that short positions carry infinite risk, including more than your initial investment. You guys know this. It's literally part of your job to know this.
But-but-the systemic risk!! This is Madness!
...Madness?
THIS. IS. THE MARKET!!! *Retail kicks the short-side hedge funds down an infinity loss black hole\*.
Ok, seriously though, that is actually a fundamentally sound, and properly profit-driven answer at least as justifiable as the hedge funds' justification for going >100% of float short. If they can be allowed to gamble INFINITE LOSSES because they expect to make profit on the possibility the company goes bankrupt, can't others do the inverse on the possibility the company I don't know.. doesn't go bankrupt and gets a better strategy from the team that created what is now a $43bn market cap company (CHWY) that does exactly some of the things GME needs to do (digital revenue growth) maybe? I mean, I first bought in on that fundamental value thesis in the 30s and then upped my cost basis given the asymmetry of risk in the technical analysis as an obvious no-brainer momentum trade. The squeeze is just, as WSB people might say, tendies raining down from on high as an added bonus.
I get that you disagree on the fundamental viability of GME. Great. Isn't that what makes a market?
Regarding the consequences of a squeeze, in practice my expectation was maybe at worst some kind of ex-market settlement after liquidation of the funds with exposure to keep things nice and orderly for the rest of the market. I mean, they handled the VW thing somehow right? I see now that I just underestimated elite hedge fund managers though--those guys are so hardcore (I'll explain why I think so a bit lower down).
If hedge fund people are so hardcore, how did the retail long side ever have a chance of winning this squeeze trade they're talking about?
Because it's an asymmetrical battle once you have short interest cornered. And the risk is also crazily asymmetrical in favor of the long side if short interest is what it is in GME. In fact, the hedge funds essentially cornered themselves without anyone even doing anything. They just dug themselves right in there. Kind of impressive really, in a weird way.
What does the short side need to cover? They need the price to be low, and they need to buy shares.
How does price move lower? You have to push share volume such that supply overwhelms demand and price therefore goes down (man, I knew econ 101 would come in handy someday).
But wait... if you have to sell shares to push the price down.. won't you just undo all your work when you have to buy it back to actually cover?
The trick is you have to push price down so hard, so fast, so unpredictably, that you SCARE OTHER PEOPLE into selling their shares too, because they're scared of taking losses. Their sales help push the price down for free! and then you scoop them up at discount price! Also, there are ways to make people scared other than price movement and fear of losses, when you get right down to it. So, you know, you just need to get really, really, really good at making people scared. Remember to add a line item to your budget to make sure you can really do it right.
On the other hand..
What does the long side need to do? They need to own as much of the shares as they can get their hands on. And then they need to hold on to them. They can't be weak hands either. They need to be hands that will hold even under the most intense heat of battle, and the immense pressure of mind-numbing fear... they need to be as if they were made of... diamond... (oh wow, maybe those WSB people kind of have a point here).
Why does this matter? Because at some point the sell side will eventually run out of shares to borrow. They simply won't be there, because they'll be safely tucked away in the long-side's accounts. Once you run out of shares to borrow and sell, you have no way to move the price anymore. You can't just drop a fat stack--excuse me, I mean suitcase (we're talking hedge fund money here after all)--of Benjamins on the ticker tape directly. Only shares. No more shares, no way to have any direct effect on the price whatsoever.
Ok, doesn't that just mean trading stops? Can't you just out-wait the long side then?
Well, you could.. until someone on the long side puts 1 share up on a 69420 ask, and an even crazier person actually buys at that price on the last tick on a Friday. Let's just say it gets really bad at that point.
Ok.. but how do the retail people actually get paid?
Well, to be quite honest, it's entirely up to each of them individually. You've seen the volumes being thrown around the past week+. I guarantee you every single retailer out there could have printed money multiple times trading that flow. If they choose to, and time it well. Or they could lose it all--this is the market. Some of them apparently seem to have some plan, or an implicit trust in certain individuals to help them know when to punch out. Maybe it works out, but maybe not. There will be financial casualties on the field for sure--this is the bare-knuckled capitalist jungle after all, remember? But everyone ponied up to the table with their own money somehow, so they all get to play in the big leagues just like everyone else. In theory, anyway.
And now, Probably the #1 question I've been asked on all of these posts has been: So what happens next? Do we get the infinity squeeze? Do the hedge funds go down?
Great questions. I don't know. No one does. That's what I've said every time, but I get that's a frustrating answer, so I'll write a bit more and speculate further. Please again understand these are my opinions with a degree of speculation I wouldn't normally put in a post.

The Market and the Economy. Main Street, Wall Street, and Washington

The pandemic has hurt so many people that it's hard to comprehend. Honestly, I don't even pretend to be able to. I have been crazy fortunate enough to almost not be affected at all. Honestly, it is a little unnerving to me how great the disconnect is between people who are doing fine (or better than fine, looking at my IRA) versus the people who are on the opposite side of the ever-widening divide that, let's be honest, has been growing wider since long before the pandemic.
People on the other side--who have been told they cannot work even if they want to, who wonder if congress will get it together to at least keep them from getting thrown out of their house if they have to keep taking one for the team for the good of all, are wondering if they're even living in the same reality.
Because all they see on the news each day is that the stock market is at record highs, or some amazing tech stocks have 10x'd in the last 6 months. How can that be happening during a pandemic? Because The Market is not The Economy. The Market looks forward to that brighter future that Economy types just need to wait for. Don't worry--it'll be here sometime before the end of the year. We think. We're making money on that assumption right now, anyway. Oh, by the way, if you're in The Market, you get to get richer as a minor, unearned side-effect of the solutions our governments have come up with to fight the pandemic.
Wow. That sounds amazing. How do I get to part of that world?
Retail fintech, baby. Physical assets like real estate might be a bit out of reach at the moment, but stocks will do. I can even buy fractional shares of BRK/A LOL.
Finally, I can trade for my own slice of heaven, watching that balance go up (and up--go stonks!!). Now I too get to dream the dream. I get to feel connected to that mythical world, The Market, rather than being stuck in the plain old Economy. Sure, I might blow up my account, but that's because it's the jungle. Bare-knuckled, big league capitalism going on right here, and at least I get to show up an put my shares on the table with everyone else. At least I'm playing the same game. Everyone has to start somewhere--at least now I get to start, even if I have to learn my lesson by zeroing my account a few times. I've basically had to deal with what felt like my life zeroing out a few times before. This is number on a screen going to 0 is nothing.
Laugh or cry, right? I'll post my losses on WSB and at least get some laughs.
Geez, some of the people here are making bank. I better learn from them and see if they'll let me in on their trades. Wow... this actually might work. I don't understand yet, but I trust these guys telling me to hold onto this crazy trade. I don't understand it, but all the memes say it's going to be big.
...WOW... I can pay off my credit card with this number. Do I punch out now? No? Hold?... Ok, getting nervous watching the number go down but I trust you freaks. We're still in the jungle, but at least I'm in with with my posse now. Market open tomorrow--we ride the rocket baby! And if it goes down, at least I'm going down with my crew. At least if that happens the memes will be so hilarious I'll forget to cry.
Wow.. I can't believe it... we might actually pull this off. Laugh at us now, "pros"!
We're in The Market now, and Market rules tell us what is going to happen. We're getting all that hedge fund money Right? Right?
Maybe.
First, I say maybe because nothing is ever guaranteed until it clears. Secondly, because the rules of The Market are not as perfectly enforced as we would like to assume. We are also finding out they may not be perfectly fair. The Market most experts are willing to talk about is really more like the ideal The Market is supposed to be. This is the version of the market I make my trading decisions in. However, the Real Market gets strange and unpredictable at the edges, when things are taken to extremes, or rules are pushed beyond the breaking point, or some of the mechanics deep in the guts of the Real Market get stretched. GME ticks basically all of those boxes, which is why so many people are getting nervous (aside from the crazy money they might lose). It's also important to remember that the sheer amount of money flowing through the market has distorting power unto itself. Because it's money, and people really, really, really like their money--especially when they're used to having a lot of it, and rules involving that kind of money tend to look more... flexible, shall we say.
Ok, back to GME. If this situation with GME is allowed to play out to its conclusion in The Market, we'll see what happens. I think all the long-side people get the chance to be paid (what, I'm not sure--and remember, you have to actually sell your position at some point or it's all still just numbers on your screen), but no one knows for certain.
But this might legitimately get so big that it spills out of The Market and back into The Economy.
Geez, and here I thought the point of all of this was so that we all get to make so much money we wouldn't ever have to think and worry about that thing again.
Unfortunately, while he's kind of a buzzkill, Thomas Petterfy has a point. This could be a serious problem.
It might blow out The Market, which will definitely crap on The Economy, which as we all know from hard experience, will seriously crush Main Street.
If it's that big a deal, we may even need Washington to be involved. Once that happens, who knows what to expect.. this kind of scenario being possible is why I've been saying I have no idea how this ends, and no one else does either.
How did we end up in this ridiculous situation? From GAMESTOP?? And it's not Retail's fault the situation is what it is.. why is everyone telling US that we need to back down to save The Market?? What about the short-side hedge funds that slammed that risk into the system to begin with?? We're just playing by the rules of The Market!!
Well, here are my thoughts, opinions, and some even further speculation... This may be total fantasy land stuff here, but since I keep getting asked I'll share anyway. Just keep that disclaimer in mind.

A Study in Big Finance Power Moves: If you owe the bank $10,000, it's your problem...

What happens when you owe money you have no way to pay back? It's a scary question to have to face personally. Still, on balance and on average, if you're fortunate enough to have access to credit the borrowing is a risk that is worth taking (especially if you're reasonably careful). Lenders can take a risk loaning you money, you take a risk by borrowing in order to do something now that you would otherwise have had to wait a long time or maybe would never have realistically been able to do otherwise. Sometimes it doesn't work out. Sometimes it's due to reasons totally beyond your control. In any case, if you find yourself there you have no choice but to dust yourself off, pick yourself up as best as you can, and try to move on and rebuild. A lot of people had to learn that in 2008. Man that year really sucked.
Wall street learned their lessons too. Most learned what I think most of us would consider the right lessons--lessons about risk management, and the need to guard vigilantly against systemic risk, concentration of risk through excess concentration of leverage on common assets, etc. Many suspect that at least a few others may have learned an entirely different set of, shall we say, unhealthy lessons. Also, to try to be completely fair, maybe managing other peoples' money on 10x+ leverage comes with a kind of pressure that just clouds your judgement. I could actually, genuinely buy that. I know I make mistakes under pressure even when I'm trading risk capital I could totally lose with no real consequence. Whatever the motive, here's my read on what's happening:
First, remember that as much fun as WSB are making of the short-side hedge fund guys right now, those guys are smart. Scary smart. Keep that in mind.
Next, let's put ourselves in their shoes.
If you're a high-alpha hedge fund manager slinging trades on a $20bn 10x leveraged to 200bn portfolio, get caught in a bad situation, and are down mark-to-market several hundred million.. what do you do? Do you take your losses and try again next time? Hell no.
You're elite. You don't realize losses--you double down--you can still save this trade no sweat.
But what if that doesn't work out so well and you're in the hole >$2bn? Obvious double down. Need you ask? I'm net up on the rest of my positions (of course), and the momentum when this thing makes its mean reversion move will be so hot you can almost taste the alpha from here. Speaking of momentum, imagine the move if your friends on TV start hyping the story harder! Genius!
Ok, so that still didn't work... this is now a frigging 7 sigma departure from your modeled risk, and you're now locked into a situation that is about as close to mathematically impossible to escape as you can get in the real world, and quickly converging on infinite downside. Holy crap. The fund might be liquidated by your prime broker by tomorrow morning--and man, even the broker is freaking out. F'in Elon Musk and his twitter! You're cancelling your advance booking on his rocket ship to Mars first thing tomorrow... Ok, focus--this might legit impact your total annual return. You need a plan, and you know the smartest people on the planet, right? The masters of the universe! Awesome--they've even seen this kind of thing before and still have the playbook!! Of course! It's obvious now--you borrow a few more billion and double down again first thing in the morning. So simple. Sticky note that Mars trip cancellation so you don't forget.
Ok... so that didn't work? You even cashed in some pretty heavy chits too. Ah well, that was a long shot anyway. So where were you? Oh yeah.. if shenanigans don't work, skip to page 10...
...Which says, of course, to double down again. Anyone even keeping track anymore? Oh, S3 says it's $40bn and we're going parabolic? Man, that chart gives me goosebumps. All according to plan...
So what happens tomorrow? One possible outcome of PURE FANTASTIC SPECULATION...
End of the week--phew. Never though it'd come. Where are you at now?... Over $9000^\)!!! Wow. You did it boys, and as a bonus the memes will be so sweet.
^\)side note: add 8 zeros to the end...
Awesome--your problems have been solved. Because...
​
..
​
BOOM
​
Now it's EVERYONE's problem. Come at me, Chamath, THIS is REAL baller shit.
Now all you gotta do is make all the hysterical retirees watching their IRAs hanging in the balance blame those WSB kids. Hahaha. Boomers, amirite? hate when those kids step on their law--I mean IRAs. GG guys, keep you memes. THAT is how it's done.
Ok, but seriously, I hope that's not how it ends. I guess we just take it day by day at this point.
Apologies for the length. Good luck in the market!
Also, apologies in advance for formatting, spelling, and grammatical errors. I was typing this thing in between doing all kinds of other things for most of the day.
Edit getting a bunch of questions on if it's possible the hedge funds are finding ways to cover in spite of my assumptions. Of course. I'm a retail guy trying to read the charts and price action. I don't have any special tools like the pros may have.

Obligatory this happened 9 years ago but I still think about it every day.
It's a long one so buckle up.
(Apologies about the grammar and such, writing is not my forte.)
Me: $D
Friend/Co-Conspirator: $F
​
This story starts with me, a 'quiet but well liked throughout the school' 17 year old in IT class at my High School in a large suburban, two city public school district. We had one of the best high school IT programs in the country at the time for many reasons. Part of our class (of about 35) involved us going around the school to do basic maintenance on school computers. Although with the exception of myself and $F, our class never touched staff computers.
Myself and $F were the two students always finishing our two week classwork cycle in about two days. So we were always tasked by our IT Teacher with helping the school IT guy (district employee stationed at the school in the IT lab) to go around and fix issues throughout the building while everyone else worked on their classwork. Often, we were loaned the IT guy's keys and district keycard to go around the school and take care of business. (This is important later) Over time, myself and $F became well known by staff around the school for being able to fix "anything" so we eventually gained a lot of trust from our IT Teacher and District IT guy. To the point that we knew passwords we ABOSOUTELY should not have known.
We knew everything from the password to the surveillance system to the master (domain admin) password district IT used to access everything from HR files to grades to mechanical systems. This password literally let us access anything on any computer in the entire district. And before you ask, yes all buildings in the district (including admin) were linked together and no they weren't firewalled off from each other. Now we never used our powers maliciously as we loved our school and never would've done anything to harm anyone or damage any systems.
One day I thought to myself "wow, Information Security (InfoSec) in this district is atrocious, I wonder how easy it would be to test it from a student perspective, then present my findings to the district IT guy". This, would be the beginning of the biggest fuck up of my life.
(I'll try to keep the technical stuff to a minimum)
My mission started one day when I was tasked to grab a computer from a classroom and bring it to the lab. Easy enough. I was given IT guy's 35+ keys and sent off. While walking to the room, I dropped the ring, it took me a minute to find the right key on the ring. When I found it, since I was looking bit harder than usual at each key, I noticed something peculiar about the key he used to open doors inside the school. It was stamped DGM and looked different than the usual *M stamp master key for this one high school building. Not seeing this abbreviation before, I thought, "ok this must be an important key since it works like a school master but looks different".
I opened the (empty) classroom, fired up a locksmithing app on my phone and took a digital impression of the key that gave me the bitting code so I could duplicate it later on, grabbed the computer, went back to the lab and gave the keys back. Curious about what this DGM stamp meant, I started googling on my phone, "DGM [Key Manufacturer]". It came up with GM as "Grand Master", the key above the master key. Nothing with DGM came up in the search. I thought "ok this is just the "grand master" key that opens all three buildings on the school property, NBD. (Main School, Theater, and Aux Gym buildings)
"Ok. but what does that D in DGM stand for? Nothing in the school district starts with a D, except... District. Holy shit, it must mean "District Grand Master. But they can't be stupid enough to make one key that opens doors in all 15 schools. Right?"
I get home and order a key duplicate on the website that built that locksmithing app. A week later it shows up and I bring it to school. Before gym class I tried it on one of the doors in the Aux gym and low and behold, it worked. Great! Part one of my test plan is complete. Someone with this key could cause a lot of damage if they wanted to, but how would they get past the alarm systems in each building? Because it would be difficult to discreetly do a lot of damage if the building was full of people. Naturally someone with ill intensions would carry out their act at night while the building alarms are armed.
I already knew that the alarm systems were controlled by keycards that every staff member in the district had. (It was an antiquated system with flaws known to the IT world) Their cards only worked for the buildings they worked in. So the cards, electric doors, and alarms must be controlled at the school level, not at the district admin office. Right?
So how was I going to get a hold of a keycard long enough to scan and duplicate it onto a new card? It required a laptop and a special piece of equipment that I couldn't just bring to school while everyone was there. I thought "I can't access the security system and lookup badge codes with the IT master password I know, that defeats the whole purpose of this test. Where's the next vulnerability in this system?" Then I realized, there's a gate to the staff parking lot that's opened with keycards, but not their district cards, they had separate cards for the gate. I scanned the entire network for this gate controller, but couldn't find it anywhere. "Good Job school district, leaving your gate system closed circuit. It's inconvenient to program, but definitely more secure."
Okay, so where is this gate controller located? I've got a district master key so when I find it, I can access it locally. I look at the gate itself and see a freshly paved line in the concrete leading from the gate motor to the Aux Gym. "Okay, its somewhere in the Aux Gym."
I wait until Saturday during Football practice, the Aux Gym is disarmed and the front door is open. Everyone's out on the field so no one will see me enter the building. "Hey there's a closet by the front door I'll try this one first." There it fucking is. The gate controller is mounted on the wall. I open up the panel and attach my laptop. "Fuck there's a password, what could it be? It's not going to be the master password, this isn't connected to the network." I look at the circuit board, there's a label with "admin - (name of city school is located in)". Unbelievable, that's the login. "District IT People are paid six-figures to make this shit up? Seriously?"
I accessed the swipe log and I noticed an interesting trend. Half the time someone swipes into the parking lot, there's an access denial that immediately precedes a valid gate card swipe. "They must be swiping their district cards first instead of the gate card!" Lucky for me, this system records badge numbers when access is denied. So I had access to several district keycard codes, protected by a password that is the name of our city. Wonderful. I sift through the logs and notice the names of three district janitors, all three with the preceding access denied messages and codes, followed by their valid gate cards. I remembered these people from my previous schools, so their district cards must open multiple buildings. (Remember when I mentioned that district buildings weren't firewalled off from each other on the network?)
I took one of the codes and encoded it onto a blank keycard with that special piece of equipment that cost me $20 on eBay, walked out the front door and scanned the card. I heard a loud click and the reader light turned green. Holy shit, I now have a DGM key and a keycard that disarms EVERY school alarm system in the district. Nothing is off limits to me. Part 2 complete.
I call up my friend $F who somewhat knew what I was doing, and once nighttime rolled around, we decided to visit almost every school in the district. Just to see if it actually worked. And boy it did. We easily swiped into each school, the alarm automatically disarmed, and the DGM key opened every door in every building we visited. I found myself thinking "Good Lord, security here is even more atrocious than I thought". We had the decency to rearm each building before we left and once we were done, we planned on telling the IT guy on monday when we went to class.
Well, my dumbass decided to try one more school the next day (Sunday Morning), I swiped in and within 10 seconds, the (middle school) principal walked through the door and asked "Who are you?" I could've bolted out the front door, but I wanted to be honest because they were gonna find out on monday anyways. So I told him who I was and what I was doing (very short version).
He took me to his office and had me sit down while he made a phone call. It was someone at the district office. All I heard him say was "I can't distinguish this from my own badge, its a perfect copy but it has his name and photo on it". He hangs up. Asks me more questions and it eventually leads to the DGM key. This especially panics him because he knew what it was but didn't know anyone other than the District Ops manager that had one. He makes another phone call, "This is (principal name) at (middle school) I need someone to come down here now." I'm thinking "Okay, someone from the district will be here to ask more questions, cool."
Boy was I wrong, within a few minutes about six police officers show up and start asking me questions. I'm honest, I tell them my plan and what I did. They all looked utterly confused by the end of my short explanation. They took the keycards and DGM key and asked me to call my parents to pick me up. They search my car and find pot in the trunk (oops). So there's a charge right there. They said they'll notify us later once they talk to the district and I was released into my dad's custody.
A few hours later, my mom gets a phone call from $VP saying I'm not to attend school monday and we will have a meeting that evening at the high school. "Okay, understandable. I haven't been able to explain myself. They're playing it safe."
Whoops wrong again!
​
IT Teacher: $ITT
District IT Director: $ITLady
Vice Principal: $VP
Cops: $PD
We arrive at the school for the meeting, my IT teacher is sitting in the school office with a disappointed yet very proud look on his face. As we arrived we were called into the conference room, I expected it to be just $VP, lmao no. It was $VP, two cops, and some random district official. My IT teacher was there just to translate the technical terms. I explain my whole plan, being interrupted many times by everyone to ask their questions. At one point $VP says "Jesus $ITT you're not supposed to be teaching this stuff!"
$ITT: $VP, Do you realize the amount of critical thinking and work that went into this project?"
Well, after he says this, there's a knock on the door. "$VP, $ITLady is here"
"Random district official" leaves and $ITLady enters and sits down in front of me"
$VP: $M this is $ITLady, the District Director of IT. She has some questions for you.
$M: Ok
She proceeds to tear into me, asking "WHAT DID YOU BREAK, WHAT DID YOU HACK?!" I could literally see the veins popping out of her head. She was pissed the fuck off.
She couldn't accept that a bored teenage kid that just wanted to see if this was possible, was able to compromise her systems in one week. At one point the officers asked her to leave the room and take a break because she was getting so worked up.
Fast forward to after the meeting, the police took myself, my mom, $VP, and $ITT to my house and seized all of my electronic equipment. Everything from my cell phone, to my laptop, to my WiFi adapter and everything in between. My favorite part was when they were searching my computer bag. The police officer opened it, rummaged around for a bit, taking everything electronic out, then gently and over dramatically pulling a strand of condom wrappers out in front of everybody.
$Mom: *Glares at me* Previously not knowing I was having sex at 17
$Mom's new BF: *Leaves room immediately*
$Cops: *Looks at $VP not sure what to do*
$ITT: *Gently facepalms*
$M: Thinking "Fuck, this is bad"
$VP: *staring at the cops for about five seconds* "Okay well let's move on"
They all leave after seizing basically everything I own.
​
Fast forward to a few days later, I get a letter from the district saying I have been suspended pending expulsion. Great.
We attend the expulsion hearing, I say exactly what I said in the first meeting with $VP and the cops.
Get another letter two days later, I'm expelled. We appeal to the school board and the district's lawyers. They don't want to hear any of it. Appeal denied. They're pressing full charges. Okay I didn't know what the charges were but they were pressing them. Cool, great.
​
Two months later I meet with county Juvenile, I again explain to them my story, they're just as confused as the district people but my Juvenile rep is taken back by my calm demeanor and willingness to share all the details. By this point the district has done a through investigation and found no evidence that I stole or caused damage to property or their computer networks. They then Inform me I'm being charged with:
-- 9 counts of Felony Burglary 2
-- 3 counts of Class A Misdemeanor Computer Crime
-- 3 Counts of Class A Identity Theft
-- 1 Count of Poss. Controlled Substance on School Grounds
I'm also ordered not to use any electronic devices until I see the judge. This included something as simple as a TV remote.
Fuck Me
​
I have a few more meetings with the County Juvenile rep, she was actually a very nice person and was surprised I was assigned to her in the first place because she usually got the murders and rapists. She got to know me and my true intensions with the entire plan over the next month.
Before my first hearing, she (the county) recommended to the school district not to press charges. They felt this could be remedied in-district, since while crimes were committed, I wasn't aware of the crimes and there was obviously no bad intent.
During the hearing, my Juvenile rep and shitty court appointed lawyer explained my side and the district lawyer explained theirs. The judge was extremely confused by the whole situation, saying "we've never seen a case like this before, at this point I don't know how to proceed" The DA also looked equally as confused.
Judge asked the district's lawyer: "How do you want to proceed?"
Lawyer: We'll take this under further review
Judge: $M expect a call from your Juvenile rep this week. Adjourned.
​
Three days later, we receive a call from Juvenile. The district is pursuing all charges and wants $80,000 in restitution for a new district security system. Wonderful news.
I live in a constant state of panic for the next three months while waiting for the next court date. I end up going to the district's alternate school for a while while attending twice weekly meetings at juvenile.
Went a few more times in front of the judge, my lawyer, Juvenile, and district lawyers doing all the talking, explaining the entire case to the judge. The district still insisting I stole and damaged district property even though I never did and they ever found any evidence.
About seven months into this, the Judge had enough. She didn't want to hear anything more and was going to issue my disposition (ruling) at the next hearing.
She explained that $80,000 in restitution was ludicrous and the district was going to pay for their own security upgrades if they chose to.
She then looked at me and asked me to rise.
Judge: "I have three options here Mr. $M"
"Option 1, I dismiss all of the charges and we'll be done here
Option 2: I drop the marijuana charge, reduce all other Charges to Attempted (Misdemeanors), and sentence you to one year bench probation
Option 3: I send you to jail right now"
I almost lost it right there.
Judge: "Based on what I've heard from our Juvenile rep and read in the police reports, I'd like to go with Option 1 and dismiss the charges. But because of the sheer severity of the crimes on paper, I am unable to do that. So I am going with Option 2. I hereby sentence you to one year of bench probation and order you to pay restitution in the amount of $3,200 for district staff overtime. Good luck Mr. $M."
I don't remember what was said after that because I was so relieved I almost passed out.
​
After three months of thinking I was going to prison for 20 years, it was all over. I was numb for the rest of the day.
All in all, The whole experience only left me with severe depression and anxiety for a few years but hey I'm not in prison. Great, right?
Actually it ended up better than I thought. I ended up graduating from the alternate school's accelerated graduation program shortly after that. (The district wanted me out of their hair ASAP)
I received a full diploma from my regular High School at the end of my junior year. I got to essentially skip most of my junior and all of my senior year of HS. Ended up working my ass off and got a great IT job at a company I still work for today. And now I have IT Director as my title.
And that is how I royally fucked up by shaming the fuck out of my school district
Shove it $ITLady!
​
TL;DR I exploited security flaws in my school district's security system. They got royally pissed and tried to send me to prison. Instead the judge gave me a slap on the wrist and I graduated a year an a half early. Now have a great job in IT.
​
Edit: Some amount of proof that this isn't fake because I forgot people on the internet are asses
Edit2: random internet people, while yes, this story is extremely dumb and sounds extremely false, I swear on my life this story is 100% true. For the techies, I intentionally left out some details because they're boring to most people. If you have a question just ask.