[ivalm]

Can you point to a GME like price action of a non-penny stock ticker? Of course we both know the answer is no. Things shot up, things shot down, of course people who bought the hype lost money. There is nothing surprising here.

[chrisco255]

https://moxreports.com/vw-infinity-squeeze/ Volkswagen 2008

[ivalm]

5x squeeze for VW vs >100x for GME. Not even the right order of magnitude.

[emteycz]

Evidently you don't know what you're talking about - of course I can. $VW 2008, $ACB 2019, $TLRY 2018 to name a few. There is much more, simply go through tickers on D1 chart and you'll see.

[ivalm]

Evidently you don’t understand difference in the size of this run up?

VW, the mother of short squeezes driven on unexpected Porsche purchase went from $200 to $1000, eg 5x

$ACB had no short squeeze, they had some run ups, with biggest in 2018 of $66 to $194

$TLRY peaked at $300 with historic low of $21 and it took months.

$GME went from $4.2 to $482 in about 5 months, none of the previous tickets you mentioned moved literally >100x. Even in 2021 GME went from $17, so over 25x in one month, this has no precedent. It leaves VW and TLRY entirely in the dust, they are not even close.

[emteycz]

Yes, the relative action was lower on other stock - we know this was a unusually large event - but it's absolutely false that "nothing like this" has ever happened. If you compare the post-squeeze prices, there's only few dozen of percentage points of difference in that same timeframe. The specific price before the squeeze doesn't really matter.

[ivalm]

GME squeeze is significantly larger in percentage points, that’s exactly my point. Nothing of this size went 100x previously. The short volume was large back when GME was $4. GME moved in 2 days as much as entire VW squeeze. It is entirely reasonable that a bubble of this sizes crashes just as spectacularly and dtcc didn’t want to hold the bag after all the bankrupt retail late comers. In fact that in reality it has been defaulting as slowly and non-destructively is kind of a miracle, in many ways thanks to dtcc quick action.

[bsanr2]

My first contact with the stock market was learning about some stock that had ballooned 1200% and crashed the next day. This was in 1999 or 2000.

[ivalm]

GME went up more than %10000 (100x) in 5 months. The geometric difference between GME and some 10x stock is the same as difference between 10x and no growth.

[bsanr2]

Weekly moves. GME, VW, and the one I'm talking about are all comparable in that sense.

[ivalm]

No, you’re wrong even in this narrow sense. GME had a weekly move from $61 to $483, or 8x. $VW went $201 to $1005 (actually split over two trading weeks, in a single trading week it was $324 to $1005). So between 3 and 5x. The weed stocks are even less.

But the thing is what makes GME an especially big risk is not any weekly move, it is the repeated weekly moves. It is the 100x growth in a stock that has essentially no chance of justifying its valuation. This was not the case with your other examples.

[bsanr2]

A great deal of GME's move before last month was fighting back against a short attack that had artificially pushed the price down. $5 was not the natural price. $5 was the price as hedge funds attempted to drive Gamestop out of business, in the midst of the COVID crash. I would accept $20, which was what the stock price climbed to before a positive earnings report and moves to restructure increased positive sentiment. The squeeze we saw was, then, 10x at best. This is in line with the 12x I mentioned earlier. VW was less, but had started at a higher point and moved similarly to GME over several months before the major event.

The 28th WAS that event for GME, but it was cut off. It's impossible to say how the differing circumstances between GME and VW's squeeze would have changed the magnitude of its peak, but they're similar enough that we could expect similar movement from $300-$400 to the actual peak if major retail brokerages hadn't prevented traders from opening positions. Go look at a chart of those two weeks. GME's looks similar to VW's, except there's a massive hole on the 28th. When buying resumed (however limited) the price shot back up to match sentiment, above $300, and then mirrored the trend over the following days. That hole is where the squeeze would have been.

Finally, the valuation during action like this is not based on the company's fundamentals but on the magnitude of the bets placed against it. Shorts piled on at extremely low price levels; the more the market decided they were wrong, the more they lost, theoretically without limit.

[sumedh]

> There is nothing surprising here.

Then why disable buying and not selling, if things were volatile the exchange could have stepped in and stop the trading. There was really no reason for DTCC to increase the margin to 100%.

[ivalm]

They disabled buying because they need to put up collateral on buys, not on sells (on sells you just pledge the shares you hold). They increased collateral because if a bunch of people buy and go bust by the time settlement time hits (because of GME price collapse) then dtcc would be on a huge hook.

[sumedh]

> They increased collateral because if a bunch of people buy and go bust by the time settlement time hits

No that is not true, there are many people who have the money in the account to buy, the broker can lock that money so the question of buyer not paying does not arise.

So the hedge funds are free to do anything yet the little guy who has the money cannot even participate. Do you understand why people think its a rigged system?