Mark Cuban Presents A “Little Trick” For Creating The Mother Of All Short Squeezes

A few days ago when Wall Street was panicking over the unprecedented short squeeze that had sent the most short names soaring and streamrolling hedge funds such as Melvin Capital, Maplelane and countless others, we said that instead of engaging in damage control perhaps Wall Street should consider how much worse it could still get. To wit, late on Jan 26 we said that a “little trick” that is available (for those with cash accounts) was for holders of GME stock to call back shares they owned of the heavily shorted names.

Here’s a little trick: everyone who is long GME should instruct their broker tomorrow to make their shares not lendable.

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 27, 2021

Just a few hours later, early in the Thursday premarket session, things started to really move: that’s when GME hit an all time high of $513.12 which has yet to be topped.

So did people call back their shares? Perhaps, we don’t know, or maybe that about to happen. According to S3 Partners, the total short interest is still a whopping 113% of the float, which means the squeeze could easily go on for a long time if the buyers kept applying pressure. None other than Mark Cuban may have assured of just that.

In a series of tweets on Friday, the iconic investor and “shark” compared the lending and rebate payment mechanism in stocks vs DeFi crypto tokens (where the bearer gets the benefit of the borrow fee and not the broker) and said – in an almost verbatim paraphrase of our “tricky” tweet from two days earlier – the following:

“one trick that I have been on both sides of is to lend out stock to shorts at a high APY and then call back my shares, which forces the short to cover. Now if #WSB did this en masse, it would be the mother of all short squeezes “.

But if they do, one trick that I have been on both sides of is to lend out stock to shorts at a high APY and then call back my shares, which forces the short to cover. Now if #WSB did this en masse, it would be the mother of all short squeezes .

— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) January 29, 2021

Cuban made another point which we also addressed previously, namely that with millions of new users signing up to r/WallStreetBets where each trader has an average brokerage account of $5,000 (soon to get another $1,400 “stimmy check” infusion), the subreddit has become the world’s biggest distributed, decentralized hedge fund with a “hive mind”, where all the individual traders coordinate and work as one, and one which can steamroll over virtually any Wall Street veteran. In fact, at this rate, Once WSB has 15 million or so members  – which should happen by the end of the week, as it now has a whopping 7 million up from 2 million at the start of the week – it will have more monetary firepower than the world’s biggest hedge fund (central banks not included) Bridgewater:

It’s becoming the biggest distributed hedge fund in the world https://t.co/LG4FskAjmH

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 29, 2021

What’s going on is basically a targeted DDOS of short hedge funds by millions of retail investors. And nobody knows what to do about it.

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 27, 2021

And here’s Cuban on this topic too:

The beauty of what has happened with #WSB is that Wall street is learning an expensive lesson that The Way Things Have Always Been Done is not How Things Should Be Done. There is power in numbers working together. Buy and Trade Together can be a whole lot more powerful than old-school buy and hold. Im not saying HODLing stocks is bad. It can be great and have the same impact as HODLing crypto. And the same principals even apply. The number of shares outstanding and their growth is comparable to coins mined (without the algorithmic control).

His full thread is below (source):

Lets talk $GME shorts vs De-Fi. When someone shorts a stock that is already heavily shorted, they have to pay a fee to borrow that stock. In the case of $GME that fee has been hovering around 30% this week. Shorts have to pay (Price x .30)/360 per day. In DeFi thats a 30% APY.

For RH Traders that own $GME that money, as best I can tell, is held in street name. Which means that 30% APR goes 100pct to @RobinhoodApp 😬😬😬. Imagine if you pooled your crypto and the platform was getting 30% APY and didnt pay all but fees to you ? What would happen ?

This is one more way that Wall St takes advantage of the little guy. If you are moving from RH, look to see if you can find some place that allows you to hold the shares and lend them in YOUR name, so you get the Yield (Yield Farming in stocks !). Not all will allow it.

But if they do, one trick that I have been on both sides of is to lend out stock to shorts at a high APY and then call back my shares, which forces the short to cover. Now if #WSB did this en masse, it would be the mother of all short squeezes .

The beauty of what has happened with #WSB is that Wall street is learning an expensive lesson that The Way Things Have Always Been Done is not How Things Should Be Done. There is power in numbers working together. Buy and Trade Together can be a whole lot more powerful than old-school buy and hold. Im not saying HODLing stocks is bad. It can be great and have the same impact as HODLing crypto. And the same principals even apply. The number of shares outstanding and their growth is comparable to coins mined (without the algorithmic control).

If small trades can work together and share information together the power to move stock pricing moves quickly from the analyst on Wall Street to the people working together. There is one VERY IMPORTANT caveat. No amount of trading together can keep a bad company in business.

But if individual traders educate each other and use their combined strength to focus on good companies , with strong prospects, the power shifts from wall street to main street, particularly now that Direct Listings are changing the IPO game. Thoughts ? Comments ?

So for all those wondering how and when GameStop will Stop, and if the squeeze is finally over, as long as iconic figures with a chip on their shoulder and a desire to inflict more pain on Wall Street continue to chime in with perspectives on how to keep the pain up, it is likely that the unprecedented short squeeze mania is not over by a long shot. And furthermore, with borrow costs now at 50%, even in the absence of further painful gains in the stock price the cost of carry alone will force the shorts to cover in the coming days should the price of GME fail to drop.