Banter and general comments, page-38287

I'm wondering if its all somehow linked back to GameStop shorting squeeze mark2.

GameStop was subject to an absolutely classic short squeeze in early 2021 as the share price rocketed from $5 to $80 and then stayed in the $40-$60 range for some time. A lot of shorters would have lot a lot of money on that. Many traders would have either gained or lost lots on the huge share price movements that occurred.

GameStop had fallen back down to the mid teen's but on Monday it was up 90% on regular trading and a another 21% in after hours trading. Volume was huge at 182m shares (68% of the free float) so akin to Core having a 1.4b shares turn over in one day's trading. As at 30 April 2024 reporting on Yahoo Finance GameStop was shorted at 21.02% of the total float and 27.73% of the total float. A company doubling in price with a large short interest is ugly for a shorter. Some may have closed. Some may have doubled up and increased their shorts. Given the history of GameStop, the shorters may expect worse to come before they regain control of the price. They may just want heaps of available capital to pay this new speculative game.

Piedmont is a heavily shorted lithium stock in the USA with 16.72% of shares shorted (as at 30 April). It was surprisingly strong on Monday with a gain of 8.2% on no news. One of the possibilities is that some of the entities shorting GameStop may have also had profitable open shorts on Piedmont and closed them to be able to redeploy that capital to new GameStop plays.

This may have cascaded to closing out other in-profit short positions like some Core lithium short positions (or the Core Lithium shorters are watching GameStop and saying ouch I hope that doesn't happen to my profits, I might just lock in a few to be safe).

And accepted Zara - this post is all hypothetical regarding the possible links between the companies mentioned.