Where did the rumor start that said the sannin were respectable people?

My 40 year old brother has lost upwards of $150,000 gambling over the last 20 years or so.
He currently lives in the LA metropolitan area. My parents have lent him over the years a lot of money. I estimate around a total of $100,000 and he still currently owes them a little over two thirds of that, with no final repayment date in sight.
He was recently laid off from his work and had to borrow over $10,000 from my parents because he has not had any savings for the past decade or so. But he’s just landed a new position nearby where he lives.
Yesterday he got a new job offer from a company based in Las Vegas. This position pays a lot more (approx $30,000) but my parents don’t want him to go because of his history with gambling.
He doesn’t agree with their assessment and is wanting to take the offer to move to Nevada.
How best to handle this situation? Is there any point trying to convince him that being in a place like Vegas won’t be a good thing?
Or does the fact that he doesn’t think he has a serious gambling problem mean that any efforts we make are bound to be futile?
Advice on this would be much appreciated...

I thought my situation was unique to myself, a black swan event, something that God just decided to fuck me over with. But the more I read, the more that I realized I exhibit the exact same qualities of a compulsive, heavy gambler. My situation aligns with that of a gambler to a T, though the circumstances put into place elevated the issue and sparked a full blown collapse of my financial wellbeing.
In 2017 I was depressed with my circumstances, I made good money but I got denied a promotion twice at my job. I was 26 at the time, I'd like to think I did well for myself over the years, having amassed $105,000 in savings and $60,000 in my 401k, with a fully paid off car, no credit card debt, fully paid off student loans for years.
I discovered cryptocurrency deeply in the summer of that year (I've known about it since 2012-2013, but didn't really pay attention to it). It was also the same year that my sister asked me to watch $100,000 of her money because she was in a shaky relationship with her husband and she wanted to mitigate potential losses should a divorce happen. I agreed and didn't think much of it at the time.
Because I was on autopilot mode at my job, I started to divulge more into cryptocurrencies on my spare time. Adding a little each week, by the end of August I ended up making $25,000 in gains off of $10,000. It had my full attention and I felt it.
People around me slowly started talking about it more and more. It became a conversation with friends and at work. It felt good to be actively interested in something again after going through the mundane period at my job. By the time Nov-Dec rolled around, 50% of my net worth was in it and I made $375,000 paper gains. Dec hit and that's when things went full euphoria mode. I put my 50% remaining net worth in it (after all, I was still employed making $115,000 a year and I was up so much it seemed unstoppable). By mid-Dec, I amassed $965,000 in "gains". I walked into my bosses office and put my 2 weeks notice in then and there.
And that's when things got fucked. January rolled around and I just tipped the 7 figure mark. Imagine that, >$900k profit, in 4-5 months and I didn't think to take profits. Well, things tanked in January 2 weeks later. I "lost" $500,000 over the course of a few weeks and I went fucking bonkers. I was overseas at the time on vacation and I started getting worried. I also put $20,000 of cryptocurrency on my credit card back in the start of January. Big mistake.
As the months went on, I was checking everyday, being depressed, feeling like shit. I needed to make up my losses. I decided to pay off my CC amount with my sisters money. Fuck it, I was a big baller, supposidely. Yeah..not really. And while this was all happening, it didn't register to me that what I was doing was completely outlandish. It was like I lost all of my rationale. Then I discovered margin trading. I was spending more and more money, paying for rent out of pocket, and while I did make $65,000 margin trading, I paid a hefty tax bill in April for my "gains".
My portfolio recovered to 60% of its high value in May 2018, and I still didn't sell. In fact, I started aggresively spending more. Margin trading, using the money that wasn't mine, and eventually getting to a point where I cut myself off. By the time summer 2018 hit, the market completely collapsed and I was in a loss from my initial buy in, while still needing to pay back the money I took. I spent everyday looking at it, hoping for things to go back up, but they never did. In the Fall of 2018, I had to withdraw my entire 401k to pay back the amount I took. At that point, I was also on the border of being evicted from my apartment as I barely was able to pay rent.
Luckily I got a new job in the start of 2019, but despite all of the hiding and secrecy, I eventually had to pay back the money in its entirety. I was short a few grand, and after dodging phone calls from my family for months I had to humilatingly borrow the remaining couple thousand to pay it back.
So here I am now, I owe an additional $6,250 for "early withdrawal penalty" on my 401k, have about $10,000 in the bank account, and completely destroyed my relationship with my family. The worst part is, my sister is happily married to the same guy. I also had to break up with my girlfriend because I was too ashamed to tell her all of this, she didn't deserve that and I feel like a piece of shit for doing so.
I rarely talk to my family at this point, I spend most of my days in a haze, and I don't know what the future holds. Its all so fucked up, for the longest time I was mad at my family for asking me to hide this money which caused me to propel a gambling addiction, but at the end of the day this is an underlying personality flaw of my own that I didn't know about. It was the wrong place, the wrong circumstances, and it was my actions, greed, and stupidity that ruined my future.
I don't really see much light coming from this. I've thought about suicide pretty much everyday, but I can't and won't bring myself to do that. Living my life in embarrassment and shame now has become the norm, people say money isn't everything but it opens doors to opportunities. It instills security, trust, and confidence in yourself/those closely involved in your life.
I don't know if I can ever trust myself again. I wish I was making all of this up.

Here is a rant that nobody cares about, but it's good enough to read, I'll even give you a TLDR now.
TLDR: We are this way, because it's the only way we are allowed to be, as retail traders.
Now that that's out of the way, lets look at it from a normie traders point of view.
​

1. Pattern Day Trading: Why does it exist? To protect us? From what? Do you ask for a W2 for everyone literally walking into a casino to see if they are capable of losing what they are risking? No, they are free to spend as they please. Funny, I thought that's what a free market was for too?
2. Market Makers: You want us to literally just stop, leave, and use a casino? Use DraftKings and that sort of platform, ok. Now what, how do you make your money off of "dumb money" when it's gone? You need us, we need you.
3. *WHY* is a collective of people on Reddit such a danger?: For the sake of arguing, before this happened, there were 800,000 of us just being collectively dumb together. LETS JUST SAY, combined, we had 1 billion dollars between 800,000 people. That's scary? You lost 2.7b in the first wave of short losses, then asked for help for another 3b. Do you know what that means? THAT MEANS, that hedge funds, as a collective, is the problem, NOT REDDIT.
4. When we got together, it was a crime, when you got together, it was not a problem? How can we be "investors" in a rigged game, literally, please explain it. We HAVE TO GAMBLE to make money, because those are YOUR RULES.
5. Trading is passive income, not a job: Yeah, it's a passive way to kill time for 95% of us, make a little side money, couple grand here or there, sometimes get lucky and make 10k. This is a lot for regular people, it's literally NOTHING to you, but debt payment and vacation funds for us.
6. We are Degenerates and Dumb Money: If a large group of dumb people cost you money is a problem...then why is a large group of smart people (you market makers and hedge funds) that manipulate costs to take dumb moneys money away, allowed?

Anyways, there is a list 3 miles long.
GameStop isn't about GameStop, it's a beacon of reason, it could have been any stock, Citron just picked the target and we used it.
Good Luck Diamond Handing gents. Think about it this way. No matter what happens, THEY HAVE LOST MORE MONEY THIS MONTH, than what average day traders have collectively made in 5 years. Let that sink in.
Edit: This blew up, appreciate all the support!
I recently saw this video, it's 10 minutes long, but the first 3 are incredibly important! Jim Cramer exposes what illegal activities hedge funds and short sellers do to manipulate the market. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMuEis3byY4&t=2s . They literally take advantage of the SEC not knowing what they do.
Hold strong brothers

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.

There seems to be a lot of interest in stocks from young investors. I imagine that many will make their way from WSB to this sub because WSB is a bunch of monkeys flinging poo. You may have lost some money and now you want to explore stocks from less of a Meme and emotional perspective.
There is nothing wrong with Meme stocks. Meme stocks can be fun. I have had fun with it. I am also a 42-year-old man with rental properties, commercial properties, and a few small businesses. BB, NOK, AMC, and even GME are all fine. The DD is fine behind all of them. The issue is that if I lose $1,000 then I can write myself a check from one of my businesses for $10,000 to make myself feel better. That is not a brag...it is simply sharing that people come from different places in life.
You are just starting off life and probably have far fewer resources and every dollar matters more.
I challenge anyone to CMV but I am not a big proponent of stocks as a core investment strategy. Here are my reasons why.

1. Information has a time-decay of value. Meaning that information becomes less valuable over time. Data is what is mined to often produce new Information. You are at a disadvantage when it comes to both data and information. The information that you get on a retail level has already lost much of its value. This is where the saying "if you read it in the news you are already too late"
2. You have no power. You simply cannot compete with whales and whales don't become whales by letting people glean the crumbs that are leftover. They have the power to move markets, you don't.
3. You have no control over outcomes. You have no control over the success of a company. You have no control over other investors. You have no control over anything.
4. The odds on options are not that great. Even compared to blackjack our betting the outside of a roulette table they are just not that good.
5. Many people that are far more intelligent than you are, lose money at stock investing.
6. Your emotions and FOMO will be a hindrance and problematic.
7. Most stock investors are too young to understand the market cycles

I like stocks as a small part of an overall investment strategy for young people for the following reasons.

1. Time is valuable and you have the most time
2. Compound interest is the "force" behind all investing and compound interest compliments the stock market very well
3. Certain strategies can complement long-term wealth building

Building wealth through stocks is like trying to build a house one brick at a time...just you, and you are gathering the straw, digging the mud, and pressing each brick by hand. When it rains many of your bricks will wash away. If the sun shines for enough days then you will make good progress.
The problem is that all markets cycle. The housing market cycles. Petroleum and natural gas cycles. The stock market cycles. I believe that a full market cycle is around 18 years with around 7-12 years in an up cycle and 6-11 in a down cycle. In the stock market, they call these bull and bear markets. We are currently in one of the longest bull markets on record due to interest rates and the feds printing money. No one has a crystal ball but sooner or later the market will peak. When this happens Boomers will be the first to pull money out and put it into bonds or CDs. Boomers are as big of a whale as retail can get. Anyone and I mean anyone could have made money in the current market. If ten years ago you had asked a five-year-old to pick five of their favorite things and invested in their choices you would have made money. That could be Barbies, YouTube, Pizza, Sprite, and their Dog. They would have made money on any stocks you picked around those five things.
There will come a day sooner or later when Boomers and GenX will see trends in the market that they don't like. Boomers own multiple houses and are deep into retirement. GenX is a small but powerful generation that is now on the back Nine Holes of life. Gen X will largely inherit the wealth of the Boomers. There will come a shift towards mitigating losses and that shift is not far away. When they move their money from markets so goes the market.
Is it fair to say that one of the longest bull cycles on record could transition to one of the longest bear cycles?
Let's look at Millenials...a generation that is struggling to just buy a home. Boomers own a few. GenX may own a couple and Millenials that are now entering into their forties struggle with one. Millenials are a massively sized generation that I believe is now bigger than both GenX and Boomers combined because Boomers are dying at a rapid pace. Millenials are the generation that were adults starting life and careers in 2008 and full-blown families with Covid-19. Maybe one of the unluckiest generations.
GenZ is this very talented and intelligent generation. Y'all are creating disruptions in culture, in politics, and in Wall Street. You are savvy and demanding. Giving billionaires the finger while pissing on the front door of their mansions.
But you need to be careful.
Stocks are not the key to your success. They are just a single tool in your toolbox. A better tool may be early homeownership or owning a small business. Life is about options...and I am not talking about the gambling options of Wall Street. I am talking about the options of having equity in a home to adapt to economic swings. I am, talking about the options of owning a small business where your day to day decisions make you smarter and more valuable. Where you own assets that make you money. Most importantly you have control over your own destiny.
I am not telling you not to invest in stocks. I am just telling you that it should be a limited part of your overall strategy in life. Unless someone has been through two complete cycles of the stock markets then I would take their advice with a grain of salt.
General advice:

1. Don't sell stocks that you have taken a loss on
2. Buy when everyone is selling and sell when everyone is buying
3. Invest in stocks with a strategy based on your knowledge and experience
4. Invest only what you can afford to lose
5. Stocks work best with time. Leave them alone
6. Be a value investor
7. Invest with a purpose

Number seven is important. For example, I like Robotics, AI, and Automation. I like these is two specific areas....transportation and mining. I operate in the Transportation industry. I know that very soon human drivers will be eliminated and self-driving trucks will take over. Trucks will be loaded, driven, and unloaded without a single human being doing any of that work. With that will come an entire supporting industry. Tow trucks will need to be automatically dispatched when trucks break down or in accidents. AI will need to be involved in decision making. I will see these changes before I am dead and I am 42.
I like underwater mining. Our oceans are the next frontier and the next gold rush. We have areas of sea bottom that has very little life but is rich in gasses, minerals, and thermal energy. Automation, AI, and robotics will play a huge role in underwater mining. I will see this transition start in my lifetime and I am 42.
Beyond that, once we have machines that are capable of underwater mining then we have the basics for machines that can mine inner-system planetary objects. From nearby asteroids to the moon, to thermal energy collection closer to the sun, to Mars and beyond. The wealthiest person in existence will be the person that is able to start the first off-planet mining operation. Where there is no EPA, no taxes on land, where we are not building sub-divisions next to mines. Where we don't have to worry about the ecosystem. Where gasses and pollutants are not pollutants because there is nothing of consequence to pollute. The largest land-owners in existence will be the owner of off-world mining operations. That may not happen in my lifetime...but it may in yours.
I like investing in Meme stocks because they are fun. But I also invest in Robotics, AI, and automation with one-single question....is this company taking humanity one-step close to automated transportation or underwater mining? I invest with a purpose.
Sure I will grab up some value stocks every now and then. People are going to be flying more than ever in a few years. People are going to be more social than ever in a few years. Shoot Condom manufacturers are a buy right now because people will be..........you get the idea.
The whole reason that I wrote this excessively long post is to maybe get you into thinking about your strategy....what is it? And to caution you on being "all-in" on stocks.
Stonks don't always go up.

Edit: Actual TL;DR - There is none. It's a complicated issue and I'm hoping you will take the time to read the post if you want to engage in the discussion. That's why the post is tagged 'discussion'.
I made a lengthy comment after reading this post yesterday. What a crazy helmet! But it was the top comment chain in that thread that caught my attention, particularly this comment:

Annoyance leads to a group that is willing to put up with it getting all the rewards but hating the game because it's annoying and a second group that doesn't put up with it but hates that they're missing out on the stuff the first group is getting. Everyone loses.

My thoughts on this subject probably merit its own discussion thread, so here it is.
This reminds me of Grod's Law:

Grod's Law: You cannot and should not balance bad mechanics by making them annoying to use

Years ago on the Giant in the Playground forums (a community for the D&D 3.5 edition tabletop roleplaying game), an argument broke out when a user recommended balancing the absurd power of magic using classes by making them meticulously track their material components for each spell.
For those unaware, material costs for spells that didn't have an explicit monetary cost listed were generally just flavorful; holdovers from Gary Gygax's day at the helm, basically little Easter eggs in the game. Like Detect Thoughts required you to use 2 copper pieces to cast, e.g. 'penny for your thoughts?', and Fireball required you to use bat guano (known to be high in sulfur content) and saltpeter (chemically combined they create an exothermic reaction IRL).
Anyway, your wizard or whatever was expected to buy a spell component pouch for a few gold and that pouch was assumed to have all the basic material components they'd need for most spells in limitless quantity. Spells in D&D can be incredibly powerful and versatile in their use, and the most powerful builds in the game all involve casting magic. Well, this user suggested balancing those spells by making wizards have to spend time gathering their individual material components. Want to cast Fireball? Spend a few days scraping bat shit off the cave floor, etc.
The problem with this rationale is that it doesn't really solve any problems. Wizards are still just as powerful, but now the player has to go out of their way, detracting from the campaign and story, so they can scrape their spell juice off the dungeon floor. Grod argued the following:

• The disruptive munchkin ignores it, argues it, or forces the rest of the group to suffer through it. His power remains the same, and he gets more annoying to play with.
  
• The inappropriate powergamer figures out how to circumvent the restriction. His power remains the same.
  
• The reasonable player either figures out how to circumvent the restriction (rendering it moot), avoids the class (turning it into a ban) or suffers through it. His power remains the same and/or his enjoyment goes down.
  
• The new player avoids the class or suffers through it. His enjoyment goes down.
  

Tie this back into PoE already!

Yes, sorry. Thanks for putting up with my rambling.
I kinda feel like harvest is like this - A terrible implementation of a mechanic that GGG (i.e. Chris Wilson) hates (i.e. thinks is 'bad' for the game). It highlights a massive problem with itemization and crafting in this game.
Way too much character power is tied up in gear as compared to skills and passives. And Harvest crafts are so powerful because other crafting tools in PoE are are way too random, but the power creep in items over the years has made it way too appealing (various influence mods for example). Crafting most items is a gamble, plain and simple. Gambling is just not appealing to many people, and it can get expensive very fast. It's layers upon layers of RNG for even the chance of getting a decent item, some of which can be build-enabling, and there are very few deterministic methods of getting what you want. It's far easier to just buy a powerful item like that from someone else. Of course, that can't be done for SSF players, but even in trade league it can be problematic when GGG balances the game around meta-builds (supply and demand means you might not get to enjoy playing your build because upgrades are too expensive).
GGG wants the game to be like this. They want you to engage in the skinner box of gambling RNG they've designed. Harvest just doesn't jive with how they want you to build your character, but it's immensely popular for anyone who hates gambling and wants to build their character in a predictable and targeted way. Their solution was to leave it in the game but make it as cumbersome and obnoxious to engage with as possible, so it becomes a massive opportunity cost to do so.
You find a grove in a map. Cue 20 to 30 minutes of reviewing your stash and gear for possible upgrades and reviewing craft options for valuable ones that might be sold on TFT, etc. It completely disrupts the flow of the game and you can barely save enough valuable crafts for one or two side builds. When you finally do get one of the few good craft options, you might not even have something to use it on! Ultimately it's far more time-efficient to sell your good crafts (using 3rd party mechanisms, of course) and just keep playing the game.

How does this affect me, SaneExile?

The system affects the game exactly how Grod proposes:

The inappropriate powergamer figures out how to circumvent the restriction. His power remains the same.

PoE isn't a collaborative tabletop game like D&D, so "inappropriate powergamer" is, well, an inappropriate name for this group. Optimizing gameplay in PoE is perfectly reasonable and encouraged. But people who trade crafts in large volume on TFT or are in massive guilds throwing around thousands of exalts are not your average optimizer, and are not affected by this cumbersome barrier to entry. They find the optimal solution and just incorporate it into their gameplay and profit off it massively.

The reasonable player either figures out how to circumvent the restriction (rendering it moot), avoids the class (turning it into a ban) or suffers through it. His power remains the same and/or his enjoyment goes down.

Reasonable player -> average PoE player. The distinction between these two groups can get fuzzy, but it's hard to argue that someone playing 40 hours per week and someone playing 10 hours per week can achieve the same levels of effectiveness. Practice makes perfect, and practice takes time. Those in large communities are, likewise, not really playing the same game as the solo players (e.g. aura-bots, trade groups, etc.). For some, efficiency is measured in chaos per hour. For a few, it can be exalts per hour. This group is very much the former.

The new player avoids the class or suffers through it. His enjoyment goes down.

Class -> game mechanic. In this case, I'm sure a lot of people just pretend the Sacred Grove doesn't exist. Harvest is a thing that other people do. And if they do choose to engage with it, its cumbersomeness and complexity means their overall enjoyment of PoE is diminished. I couldn't even begin to explain the system to someone new to the game, at least in a reasonable manner that doesn't sound like a college economics lecture.

Conclusions

So, average people either suffer through harvest's implementation because it's so damn useful, or they avoid it and suffer FOMO or other gambling-induced psychological issues because the power-players in the community are cranking out incredibly OP gear on the trading market. Lose-Lose. This isn't unique to harvest, it's just the most obvious with this crafting system in the game. Crafting in general is fucked up, when you really consider how it's designed to prey on gambling addiction.
This might not be a problem in the short term (obviously you don't need the helmet posted above to make specters work), but in the long term it throws off the balance of the game through power creep. The Raise Specters gem was meganerfed this league, but it's definitely still playable, and with items like this, it's not even that much weaker than before. Essentially, the power of the skill was offloaded from the gem to PoE's itemization system, and the barrier to OPness is that much higher. The rich get richer and the average market has one less meta build.
GGG really fucked up Harvest, but it's only because Harvest highlighted just how fucked up crafting in this game is. Super powerful crafts have always been something only the PoE rich engage with regularly and with any significant profit. Harvest, for its league at least, let more casual players engage with that system. And the power creep ended up being so massive that they hamstrung it every chance they got.
Ultimately, GGG's implementation ends up hurting the whole game because of Grod's Law - the benefits of it are minimized while the annoyance is maximized. It's possible we can benefit from some stopgap solutions, like more horticrafting station space, tradeable crafts (like beasts), etc., but many of these come with their own host of issues. They're just bandaids on the crafting mechanic as a whole, which is a product of the itemization design.
TL;DR, thanks for coming to my TEDTalk. General disclaimer that this is my personal opinion of the state of the game, one that I've put way too much time into. It's still fun in a lot of ways, but the more I play the more I see problematic design features creeping their way into the game.
Edit: Well this took off. I've been trying to address arguments from you all as best I can, but there's one I noticed in particular keeps coming up and I think my main post didn't clarify my stance as well as it could've:
I'm not against the idea of RNG. Randomness in itself is not a problem for this genre or most games in general. I am however very much against the argument that, 'well the entire game is randomness so more randomness is fine.' I've tried to address that in this comment, which I'll link instead of reiterating.

GME Short Squeeze What Comes Next Part 3
Hello all,
Before I begin I would like to address something I have been encountering on my posts in the comments section. I keep receiving some hate concerning my opinions and I want to be crystal clear that they are just that; opinions. I also want everyone to know that is is meant to be a dialog. I am not trying to pump this stock because truthfully, this goes far beyond us retail investors at this point. What I want is a dialog between all sides to examine this truly fascinating phenomenon that is occurring.
I would also like to clarify something, I am not a bagholder. I do currently hold bags because I own 336 shares at a $194.34 cost basis, however, that total amount is house money that was used from my profits on the first go around.
I also understand some people are tired of hearing about this because it's the same regurgitated form of someone else's post as it keeps circulating in an attempt to retain hype and drive future buying; this is not what this post is about. As investors and individuals involved in the world of finance, this situation should absolutely intrigue us whether or not we are involved. I am here to present my logic on the situation but encourage healthy discussion and debate.
This brings me to my first claim. This is not over. Now, I am not claiming that a squeeze will still occur, I am simply claiming it is not over, for better or for worse. Several things need to take place for this to be completely over, at which point I will either post my gains or my losses from the adventure.
When I say "it" I am referring to this entire phenomenon, not one short squeeze. I do not think these events, "it", is over. This is largely due to retail and institutional purchasing not really changing all that much since we found the bottom and established support at a staggering $60. This support was lost today and found new support at $50. There was very interesting ATH action and I'm not sure what to make of it.
Millions of bag holders (not just WSB) are still holding and in fact, averaging down, thereby purchasing more. These same bag holders are absolutely refusing to sell for such massive losses and in turn are becoming long term investors on the stock if another squeeze isn't to occur. People are picking up speculative positions in the off-chance of another squeeze. Others are determining this as a fair value for the company, not fundamentally, but based on the future prospects of Ryan Cohen and team. Finally, it is nowhere near leaving the global stage with important upcoming dates that we will discuss later.
To examine why it isn't over let's look at both sides of the argument:

1. Bulls claim it's not over for many reasons that you can find in the hundreds of other bullish posts, so I won't bore you with those details. My argument on the bull side is more along the lines of what I listed above.
2. Bears claim it is over because there was a 2250% price increase over the course of two weeks, therefore this must be a short squeeze.

I think we can all agree, bear or bull, that something happened. A 2250% increase certainly isn't nothing. The question is...what? I see several possibilities and would like to discuss them in the comments.

1. The shorts in fact covered and this was a short squeeze.
2. The shorts partially covered and this was a partial short squeeze, but the price increase was mainly hype and gamma squeezes.
3. The shorts didn't cover anything and this was a globally hyped price increase in conjunction with several gamma squeezes.
4. Some combination of the above 3.

First, the data:
Based on morningstar the short interest is showing 78.46%. Now, I think the website is having some issues storing cookies because it will show the outdated 226% unless you open it up in incognito.
Market watch is showing 41.95%
This spread is interesting for sure, my thoughts are some of these calculations are including "synthetic longs" introduced by S3.
It is extremely possible to manipulate these numbers via illegal methods and even legal methods using options. Please see this SEC document to explain how this would work. I am not trying to convince anyone to fit my narrative, but these things occur far more commonly than one would expect. The reasoning is because the fines for committing the crime are far less costly than letting the event take place. Please see FINRA's website for the long, and frequent list of fines being dealt out due to manipulation. A common culprit? Lying about short volume.
Let's use the absolute worst case scenario being reported of 41.95%, which mind you is still extremely high for one stock:
The shorts in fact covered and this was a short squeeze
What's interesting here is even if the shorts 100% covered all of their positions, they very well could have shorted on the way back down. Why wouldn't you? It would be insane to not open a short position when this hit nearly $500 especially if you lost half of your companies money; what better way to get it back? For the remainder of this thesis, I will be assuming that some of the short positions that exist are newly opened positions at a higher price unless someone has a counter-claim as to why that wouldn't be possible/probable.
That would mean 226% was covered on the way up and another 41.95% was reopened on the way back down. Based on the volume and price changes throughout the past two weeks this simply doesn't pass the math check.
The shorts partially covered and this was a partial short squeeze.
Again, using 41.95% this is highly likely and the most reasonable case. Some, probably the worst positions, were covered on the way up.
I think this is precisely what happened, we had some partial shorts covering but for the most part it was gamma squeezes, hype, and FOMO whereby the price started climbing so rapidly it became smarter for the shorts to just wait out the bubble than to actually cover all of their positions.
Again, we fall into a "what-if" scenario regarding shorting on the way back down.
The shorts didn't cover anything and this was a globally hyped price increase in conjunction with several gamma squeezes.
This scenario does not pass the math check using the 41.95% figure.
If the data is being manipulated then this becomes very interesting because if some of the worst positions are still open then that means all of these HF's losses that were reported were strictly interest and they are simply waiting this out for as long as it takes making back their losses on their newly opened short positions in t $300-$400 range.
Sadly, this puts us in the guessing range yet again. We can do the math and see it's possible this scenario exists, however, we would be comparing it against losses reported by the entities that were being squeezed.
There are way to many what-if's for me to me consider this a possibility, but I can't write it off completely.
Some combination of the above 3.
Truthfully, this isn't worth examining just yet. There would be far to many "what-if's" to address, this is something that could be address at the later dates that we will get to shortly.
Now, I've heard it a lot regarding the 02/09 data. "It's two weeks old". Well, that is always the case. The FINRA short data is always two weeks old and suggesting that we can't pull any information from it at all is asinine. Where it gets quite murky, is the data includes 01/27 information. This was a day unlike any other in this saga.
I will take this moment to address the following upcoming catalysts and when I truly think this will be done; one way or the other.
Today's data 02/09, was very important because if it showed an extremely low percentage then we know shorts have exited and did not re-enter and this is completely done. Given the data does not reflect that, we now must turn to several events that could act as catalysts for either a further squeeze or a complete shutdown.
02/19 - In my last post, I discussed the Failure To Deliver (FTD) conundrum. I do need some help figuring out the exact expiration date. From here "The close-out requirement states that a participant of a clearing agency needs to take immediate action to close 4 out a fail to deliver position in a threshold security that has persisted for 13 consecutive settlement days by purchasing securities of like kind and quantity."
The exact date is slightly irrelevant because I highly doubt all of these FTD's are going to deliver on the same exact day. This site, while it isn't an official channel seems to be doing a good job of tracking data. If you want to learn more about FTD's and the implications there please visit that site or review my last post which has links to follow for further reading.
02/18 - Keith Gill aka u/DeepFuckingValue will testify before congress and RH CEO Vladimir will be attending. This can go several ways which can lead to an SEC trading halt on GameStop or with evidence that proves foul play occurred. Who knows? It will certainly be interesting and I don't even to speculate on the market reaction to this even because it could go a ton of different ways; it will be an important date nonetheless
02/24 - The next FINRA short interest information will be made readily available to the public. This will be far more interesting and helpful information because it won't include the insane volatility of January, but it will also highlight the newest short positions. This data will help further drive where I think this is all going to end. It's possible that shorts opened new positions at $50 thinking it was going back to $12. Let's not speculate too much here either, it's just another dataset that will bring light to the direction this is headed.
03/25 - GameStop ER. This is big too for several reasons. First, this will include the console sales cycle which historically has done well for GameStop. A typical buy the hype, sell the news event. It will be interesting to see how the market reacts leading up to this ER, maybe people won't even touch GME leading up to then due to the recent volatility, but if they do, and if there is still a lot of short interest, this too could force shorts to begin covering. Another critical part of this ER is Ryan Cohen. This will be the first time this new board addresses the public with their plans for the future and for the first time since this entire adventure began, the "dying brick and mortar" narrative will finally begin to change in the public eye. That is still the common misconception regarding GameStop, that it is a dying brick and mortar retailer where nothing has changed. This hasn't been the case for around 6 months now, but this will be the first time it is publicly address. The headlines surrounding GameStop's future plans will be very interesting to read and the markets reaction will be far more interesting.
I have been asked a lot what my PT is and when I expect the squeeze to happen, but let me be clear. Very seldom do squeezes "just happen". In fact, short squeezes are far more common than one would think, they just typically happen over months, if not years and the shorts cover on dips so you don't even notice it's happening. In order to force a squeeze, you need to hold a decent amount of shorts underwater. Soon one will crack and start closing their position, this leads to a series of shorts closing their positions skyrocketing the price until more and more shorts need to cover. This is rare.
I hope this narrative of purchasing heavily shorted companies comes to a close soon because a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money simply buying up companies because they are heavily bet against. Catalysts and massive changes need to occur like overhauling your entire business as is the case with GameStop.
Normally, shorts will close their positions one at a time, covering on dips and you don't even notice it's happening. In times where you see a price rise of seemingly no news could very well be shorts closing their positions because their research led them to realize this company is on the road to recovery.
I digress. Given the most recent data and the multiple upcoming catalysts I am still very bullish on a GME short squeeze. My post from quite some time ago illustrated the importance of catalysts regarding a short squeeze, this is still very much the case. The first run was interrupted and the second run won't happen with magic, it requires a catalyst. Another post was titled For those who do not understand the inevitable GME short squeeze, was at the time "inevitable" because math. That is no longer the case. It is no longer inevitable but it is still possible.
I want to be clear: This is not nearly as close to a sure thing as it once was and it depends on a lot of different factors. One of the largest is the people. Granted, a lot of what's happening now is in the hands of institutions but millions of retailers holding their positions to the grave certainly helps the institutional buyers have more faith in their play to continue a squeeze.
SO WHAT DO I THINK
I think shorts certainly covered some of their positions, but not all. I also firmly believe a significant amount of short positions were opened on the way back down by both HF's and individuals. Some certainly positioned high, but based on sentiment, it appears a lot of people think GME is fairly valued around $20 (which I disagree with but let's use that for the time being). That would mean shorts would have no problem opening positions at 100,70,60, even $50.
42% is still very high which means a squeeze is inevitable so long as the company continues in a positive path. However, squeezes typically aren't as abrupt as people think. They are actually quite common, in fact another position I'm heavily invested in is SPCE and they have been going through a squeeze for several weeks and will continue to squeeze so long as news continues to be positive.
How would we get an abrupt short squeeze? A massive bull run. The new shorts that entered at lower levels wouldn't be too hard to catch, however, they are probably low volume, so when they buy to close, it won't be large enough volumes for massive peaks, but a bull run very well could lead to these lower tiered shorts closing, triggering a gamma squeeze. If gamma squeezes are made week over week then shorts at the higher end would have two options:

1. Close early and take profits
2. Wait it out because they are positioned so well that interest means nothing and they don't think there is any hope of us rising to those levels.

In the first case, them closing early would be a nice short squeeze to probably several hundred dollars, but it wouldn't break $1000.
To break $1000 we would need a big bull run to catch the shorts, trigger gamma squeezes, and keep momentum until they are caught and underwater. This is highly unlikely unless there is another global sentiment.
NOTE: ALL OF THESE ASSUMPTIONS I AM MAKING ARE BASED ON THE 42% REPORTING. IF IT IS IN FACT 78% THEN THE POSSIBILITY IS TREMENDOUSLY INCREASED FOR THESE THINGS TO HAPPEN.
SO WHEN DOES IT ALL END
My though is if by the end of March these catalysts were not enough to reignite the hype and squeeze, then it will essentially be over except in the case of a few circumstances:

1. A VW/Porche moment occurs where a large buyer picks up a large portion of the company.
2. Some other currently unknown catalyst appears seemingly out of thin air
3. The data was in fact manipulated. Regardless of what the data says, if the shorts did in fact lie about their short int to take the fine over being squeezed, then they will be squeezed regardless.

It is quite possible, that these catalysts and moments aren't enough to force a squeeze anymore especially if the shorts have repositioned really well. I will retain the mindset that this fateful January 2021 was not a short squeeze. However, that does not mean it will ever actually happen.
SO WHAT IS YOUR PLAY HOOMAN?
Well, I am long on GME which is why I didn't mind hopping back in even at outrageous prices. I will continue averaging down and don't plan on selling for quite some time, probably several years. The reason for this is I believe in Cohen and his team to turn this into something unexpected and I imagine an eventual ROI. Once this is all said and done and I think either the shorts truly have covered or they simply got away with it (Beginning of April), I will be posting my DD for GME as a long play regardless of the squeeze mechanics.
Thank you all for joining me on this wild journey. I hope we can discuss some of these points in the comments like adults and truly try to grasp this wild situation we are all in. There are extremes on both sides from "get over it, the squeeze happened" to a cult like mentality on the other extreme. I hope through discussion we can find the moderate approach and further understand the market mechanics at play.
Thanks for your time
WARNING: Until the squeeze business is over for good, this is a very volatile and risky play. Joining now for the hope of a potential round 2 squeeze should only be done in a speculative manner with money you are willing to lose. This is more akin to a gamble than it is investing. I think the current market price is fair given the future prospects of the company but do your own DD, I will not be releasing any until this squeeze is put to rest.
TL;DR: I am still bullish on this scenario even at 42%, if it really is 78% then I am extremely bullish. There are a plethora of upcoming catalysts that could reignite the squeeze but even if none are powerful enough, with Cohen's new direction we could expect good news for quite some time forcing shorts to exit on a more spread out timeline.
Disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor. I do not wish to sway your opinion in either direction. I simply seek to examine this interesting and volatile situation via crowd sourcing. What you do with your money is entirely up to you.

I'll admit it. All this Blackberry pump got me hyped and I want to get some action too. BB has potential to moon, but I think a lot of you will still manage to lose money, because you are picking wrong strategies.
The problem
I know this sub is obsessed with short term OTM calls. However by buying these you are doing no justice to yourself and this community.
Let me explain. Have you ever wondered who sells you these calls? I'll tell you. Big guys and by big guys I'm talking billion dollar financial institutions that we call market makers. Market maker does not care which stock, what strike, how many 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 we put here - all they care about is to make money by selling you calls.
Market makers are very good at managing risk. Whenever they sell calls, they make sure they have the underlying stock. That way, they essentially sell covered calls instead of naked calls.
When you look at the option table, you will notice a column called Open Interest. It basically tells you have many option contracts are out there in the wild. Think about this as a number of retards holding these in their Robinhood account, hoping to get rich quickly.
Market makers love when there is a big hype around certain stock, especially certain strike and date. They sell these calls to you retards, and all they have to do as the expiration date nears is make sure the stock stays below the most popular strike, aka strike with the most open interest.
Why would they do that? Because they make free money by selling you these worthless gambling short term tickets.
How would they do this? By shorting the stock. Remember they are so big that they can afford to short the stock and suppress the price of the stock in the short term just in time for your short term calls to expire worthless.
I know some of you geniuses will tell me that market makers can't manipulate the stock in the short term; sure keep telling yourself that while you ride in your 2010 Toyota Corolla.
You are easy targets
Over 11,000 of you idiots, bought $12 February calls. Don't believe me? Check it yourself: https://twitter.com/silberschmelzestatus/1350903153433128967/photo/1
All market makers have to do now, is make sure BB does not moon past $12 by February 19 and they are set. You lost your stimulus check money and have no means to play again.
March is even worse: https://twitter.com/silberschmelzestatus/1350910637451468801/photo/1. All of you piling into $15 strikes. Why are you making yourself easy targets? You are disclosing your strike and your date! What if BB moons in April? Can you sustain wasting money on these monthly calls with your minimum wage jobs?
The solution
Buy shares. They do not expire. There is no pressure to be right. You want to be on the 🚀 when it starts taking off, instead of being broke on the ground.
With worthless calls, no one will like you - even this sub will make funny of you.
Believe me. I've been here long enough to remember MSFT 03/21/2020 C $200 and PLTR 12/31/2020 C $30.
TL;DR Buy BB shares, not short term OTM calls.

I run a private campground. It’s been in my family for generations. For those of you with a rich family history, I’m sure you know how stories tend to accumulate. They get passed along haphazardly from one generation to the next, distorting as they do, and the truth grows muddy along the way. Land is like that too, except instead of gathering stories about Aunt Jodi’s scandalous first husband, it gathers monsters.
If you’re new here, you should really start at the beginning and if you’re totally lost, this might help.
There’s a lot to do to maintain a campground and I’ve been having to do a lot of the work myself around here. I don’t want my winter staff going into the deep woods without a good reason right now. Normally I’d send Bryan, as he has the dogs to protect him, but those are on loan. Also, I haven’t seen a lot of Bryan. He shows up, he gets the work done that he needs to, and then he just… vanishes for a while. I don’t know if he’s visiting his dogs or the fairy or both. And now that I think about it, Bryan tends to make himself scarce throughout the year. I guess I haven’t paid that close of attention before. He still gets the job done just fine so does it really matter if he’s off visiting his fairy bff in his downtime?
Unfortunately, even with the spiders’ help, I’m still battling the thorns in my chest. It’s taking a lot of my strength away and I’m getting winded easier. It’s made getting rid of these accursed things a priority. I know the fairy said they’d go away when they killed the fomorian, but as many of you have pointed out, they’re taking their sweet time going about that.
I do have a theory about the current stalemate, though. The fomorian probably wants the thorns to cover more of the campground. The fairy probably wants the sun to return, being of the company of Lugh and all. And both of them probably want less treacherous footing for their steeds.
I see the dapple gray stallion’s hoofprints in the snow sometimes. It makes it easy to avoid. I just turn around and immediately go in the opposite direction.
With this surefire way of avoiding my nemesis, I figured it was time to try a gamble. The fairy initially told me that I could try finding a way to banish the thorns by seeking out another entity of disease. I’ve taken that to mean the gummy bears. Their presence has brought sickness and rot before. The only problem was I really wasn’t sure how to find anything out from them. Did I use their bodies in an elixir? Did they have the answers themselves? There was a human shaped gummy bear, at least until one of Byran’s dogs splattered it. Perhaps there’s more intelligence among them than I thought.
I decided to try out one of Mattias’s strategies. He learned a lot about these creatures simply by being close to them. Following their paths through the woods.
I figured the worst that would happen is I’d wander around the forest for a bit and maybe feel a little stupid.
...okay, that’s really not the worst that could happen, considering the upheaval my land is experiencing, but barring any other catastrophe it wasn’t that dangerous of a plan.
Or at least, the first part wasn’t.
I got some dead mice from the pet store to bait the traps with. They weren’t very big, so I didn’t expect to attract any of the larger gummy bears. This was perfectly fine with me. I was in no hurry for another encounter like the last one, especially with the dogs on loan to the fairy. I baited the traps and left them scattered throughout the deep woods.
Within a couple days the traps yielded results. I found the jellied remains of a rabbit inside one of the traps, staring at me with glistening eyes, its translucent ears quivering. I crouched beside the cage.
“I’m going to let you out,” I said. “Don’t try to bite me or I’ll drop-kick you into the afterlife.”
Just to be safe, I released the gummy bear with the cage door pointing away from me. The rabbit bolted and I sprinted after it, only to lose it within seconds. So the worst case scenario came true, I felt real dumb there, standing in the woods and belatedly realizing that I couldn’t actually keep up with a rabbit.
The second gummy bear I caught was a raccoon. That’s still not something I was convinced I could keep up with, so I took the liberty of breaking both of its hind legs before I released it. The bones snapped like dry branches. The gummy bear hissed wetly and bared its yellowed teeth at me, but otherwise didn’t seem to be in pain. I’m not sure if this qualifies as animal cruelty and frankly, I’m trying not to think about it too hard.
This time, I had no problem keeping up with the gummy bear once it was released. It dragged itself along by its forelegs, seemingly oblivious to the dangling appendages that trailed behind it. Our progress was slow and I impatiently began to wonder if perhaps I should have only broken one. There was nothing I could do about it now. The gummy bear would turn and hiss at me if I got too close, so I kept a healthy distance between us.
And I followed it. I honestly had no idea where it would lead me, but Mattias’s journal implies that he learned everything he did by being close to these inhuman things. The world is less stable when they’re nearby, he claimed. Things slip through.
It took a long time. I was tempted to quit and go home repeatedly and each time I had to remind myself to have patience. Mattias surely had, as he didn’t have the siren call of the internet luring him away. The raccoon made a circle of the deep woods, its pace consistent, dragging its broken legs behind it. It moved with purpose. It stayed off the road, but I caught glimpses of gravel now and again through the barren trees. After a little while I realized that it was slowly but surely turning, heading back towards the hill that led up and out of the forest.
I was beginning to think this had all been a waste of time and I should just finish the thing off. Watching it drag itself all through the woods for the past couple of hours had stirred an acute sense of guilt about this entire affair. Killing something was one thing. That’s a matter of life and death, generally. But crippling something like this… perhaps there’s more of my father in me than I thought. He’s in the quiet spaces of my soul and most of the time I can’t hear him over the roar of my anger.
I heard him now.
I steeled my resolve and hefted the crowbar I’d brought along for just this purpose. Blunt weapons are the best tool for destroying gummy bears. Sharp edges can cut pieces off them, but that won’t necessarily slow them down. Even if you cut it in half you could get unlucky and the pieces might reconnect and join back together and then you got a gummy bear with its ass literally stuck to its shoulder flailing around and trying to bite you.
Blunt trauma, however, separated the parts beyond repair. Like dropping a cherry pie on the floor. You aren’t getting that back together in a cohesive form. And like an exploding cherry pie, the gummy bear burst into a gooey red smear that coated the nearby ground and splattered on the trees when I brought the crowbar down into the center of its body.
Something like smoke hovered over the ground. It was only there for a second. I might have missed it, had I not been watching. Ever since my encounter with the human sized gummy bear I’ve been thinking about what I saw and experienced and wondering if I’d imagined it. But there it was. A miasma. An ill wind carrying sickness to anyone that inhaled it. It rolled away from me, traveling uphill, and then it passed between two trees and was gone.
I almost walked away. But something stirred in the back of my mind, sluggishly connecting the pieces. Dropping each thing that had happened into place until the pattern was evident.
I’d followed it around the old woods. We’d made a circle and were now at where we’d begun. Except sometimes… when walking in a circle with intent… you don’t actually wind up back where you started.
There are other worlds inside my campground. Many more than what I have encountered already, according to my ancestor.
I walked after the smoke and passed between the two trees and they creaked as I went by them, bending their heads to twine their branches so that I passed under an arch and then…
I was elsewhere.
The hall. I’d found the hall of the gummy bears.
I need to stop using such stupid names for the things on my campground.
The structure was of primitive construction. The ceiling was thatched and birds flew between the rafters. There were no windows and the only light came from candles burning in sconces on the wall. The air was thick with the stink of rancid fat and smoke. I tried to take shallow breaths and walked slowly forwards across the rushes strewn over the dirt floor. Small things rolled and broke under my feet. I did not look closer to see what they were. They felt like bone fragments.
The hall continued on for a long time. The darkness swallowed me up and I could only see a handful of yards in any direction. The columns supporting the roof blurred together, each one the same as the last. Round posts with the bark roughly hewn off, painted in ochre tones of yellow and red. Primitive colors made from the earth. This place was very old, a remnant from the earliest edges of human civilization.
I reached the end of the hall. At first I took the back wall for a mosaic, dark wood interspersed with ivory points of varying sizes. Then, as I drew closer, the shapes resolved themselves. Skulls. The back wall was covered with skulls. Animal skulls of all sizes. I recognized groundhogs, squirrels, deer, and a couple coyotes.
A platform of rough hewn stone was built against the back wall. On it sat a chair, backless, with a rounded seat of hide stretched between two ornate arms. The carvings that covered the legs and arms were the only intricate decoration I’d seen in this entire place.
I crept closer to the chair, trying to get a better look. It was then that I noticed there was something strange about the mortar holding the stones together.
It glistened in the faint candlelight, like a fatty cut of meat.
I drew up short with a sudden sense of unease. Nervously, I hefted the crowbar, taking confidence in its weight. I held still and listened to my surroundings, intently searching for any noise, any sign that something was urgently amiss.
A rattling in the corner. Like the scuttling of tiny claws. I pivoted to face it, just in time to see one of the skulls fall off the wall.
It did not strike the ground. It stopped just short, as if falling into thick snow, and then it tilted gently to one side and went motionless. Smoke condensed beneath it, barely discernible in the dim light of the candles.
It felt like it was staring at me.
Then it was gone, swiftly flowing out of sight the instant I blinked. Heart pounding, I watched the shadows, trying to discern where it had gone. But behind me I heard another noise, like the scrape of claws, and I turned to face it just as another skull fell from the wall. This, too, was caught by the smoke.
I felt like my heart was ready to burst from my chest. The rushing of my own blood echoed in my ears. I licked my dry lips and waited, my eyes darting back and forth in a vain attempt to watch all angles. The room was silent. I couldn’t depend on my hearing. How would smoke make noise?
The first came from my right. It swept in low, the smoke billowing like the incoming tide. I turned on my heel and brought the crowbar down in an overhead swing. It connected just as the creature surged upwards, the empty eye sockets leering. The mid part of the crowbar crushed through the skull and into the brain cavity and the smoke dispersed as if flattened, floating back down to the ground.
Blunt teeth raked against my shoulder. I hissed and spun, swiping sideways with the crowbar as I did. It passed through the column of smoke and the creature faltered, as if losing its balance, and a follow-up swing sent the skull tumbling away in three separate pieces.
More skulls were rattling on the wall. Three fell. Then two more. They were quickly swallowed up in the darkness, only to emerge seconds later, lunging at me from the shadows. I would dispatch one with a well-aimed blow and then turn to counter another. Or feel the bite of their teeth. I could only be thankful there was no jawbone with which to crush whatever limb they latched onto when they had an opening. Still, the teeth broke skin. I barely felt the pain underneath the adrenaline.
They were aiming for my throat. For my abdomen. And for every one I dispatched, another couple skulls would fall.
Then there was another sound, overwhelming the rattling of the skulls or my own frantic breathing. Laughter. A gurgling, wet laugh, emanating from the direction of the throne. I risked taking my eyes off the shadows and saw that the mortar holding the stones together was not… actually… mortar.
It was flesh. Jellied, translucent flesh. And it was seeping upwards, congealing on top of the dais, working its way up the legs of the throne.
And it was laughing.
“Send them all!” I screamed at the dais. “I’ll smash every skull on that damn wall if I have to!”
There were so many now. They crowded between the columns, lines of ivory skulls bobbing on a thick carpet of smoke. I exhaled slowly, trying to steady my nerves. I could do this, I told myself. I was stronger than them. Their teeth could not pierce very far and so I only had to outlast them and protect my vitals. And hadn’t Beau taught me how to outlast?
“Go on,” I growled. “My name is Kate. I’ve killed inhuman things before and I’ll destroy all of you as well if I have to.”
The chuckling finally stopped with a final, satisfied note echoing down the long hall. Panting, I pivoted, watching as the creatures receded into the shadows between the columns. Finally, only once the silence returned and nothing else came out of the darkness at me, did I turn and give my full attention to the mass at the fore of the room.
It covered the throne as a shapeless mound of flesh the color of an onion. A quivering lump fully the height of a human and just as wide, the chair hazy behind the translucent jelly. As I watched, small shapes detached from the dais. Stones, two the size of my fist and the rest the size of walnuts. These slowly made their way up through the entity’s body until they floated in the middle of the space between the arms of the chair. The larger stones positioned themselves as eyes and the rest became teeth. The teeth split apart and it began to speak.
“Have you brought me tribute?” it gurgled.
“No,” I replied.
“Then you are an intruder.”
All around me, the skulls shifted, moving forwards a pace. I resisted the urge to raise my weapon once more.
“That is not my intent either.”
“Ahhhhh.” The teeth spread into a smile. “Then you are a supplicant.”
“Are you a king of the Partholanians?” I asked.
Those ancient people of Ireland who died of disease.
“It has been a long time since I’ve heard their name,” it replied thoughtfully. “We are of them. They had a name for our hall. It has since been forgotten.”
I briefly considered telling it what we call them, but quickly squashed the idea. I didn’t want to cause myself more problems by naming it and I certainly didn’t want to name it “the hall of the gummy bears” I mean that’s a terrible name.
DO NOT CALL IT THAT IN THE COMMENTS.
“There’s thorns on my land,” I said. “They’re rotting the trees.”
“So you seek us?”
“They say the Partholanians died of disease.”
“You are a supplicant, here to beg a boon,” it hissed.
My heart sank. Another bargain. It named what it wanted with no small measure of malicious joy and I knew before it finished that I would not be able to grant what it wanted.
It asked for bodies. Human bodies. Not these weak animals that they steal here and there, filling their wretched, dead corpses with the spirits of its people until the flesh dissolved to pieces around them and they came fluttering back here, to this last refuge of its kind. It wanted living flesh. Strong flesh, that they could inhabit and walk among the living once more.
I said that wasn’t possible. I offered it dead human bodies. It was something, at least, and I could obtain those. The funeral home might be willing to help. I only needed to fulfill the bargain long enough to get a remedy for the thorns, I thought desperately.
The creature refused. They were tired of inhabiting dead things, bodies that had already given up on life and could not be restored. It wanted a heart that remembered how to beat and lungs that knew how to breathe.
“And what of the person that inhabits that flesh?” I asked.
“Perhaps the soul will stay. Perhaps it will depart. I do not care.”
If I did this, it said, it would give me what I needed to stop the rot. I took a deep breath. And I agreed to its bargain. It shook with pleased laughter.
“One last question,” I said. “Why can’t you get a body of your own making, like how the other creatures on my campground have?”
Beau says he remembers being on my land, walking down the road looking for someone to share his drink with. He came from somewhere, as did the hammock monster and the lady with extra eyes and all the others.
“The watcher will not let us pass,” it hissed. “We are too weak. We cannot take form. We can only steal, scavenging the scraps. It is a shameful survival. Do you pity us?”
“No,” I said quickly.
“Nor do we pity you. We see your death sometimes, lurking in the woods.”
“My death?” I asked desperately. “The beast? Or something else?”
It chuckled, a sickening gurgling sound, like boiling mud.
“Bring me bodies,” it said, “and perhaps I will tell you more.”
I recognized the dismissal. I turned and walked away, the skin on the back of my neck crawling under the weight of all those empty eyes watching me go. The doors to the hall hung open for me and when I passed through, the trees unwound themselves and the arch and the hall were gone. There were only the snow-laden branches of the campground.
I’m a campground manager. I have no intention of honoring this bargain. I admit that it is tempting to give some of my more problematic campers to them. Heck, for some of them, being a flesh vessel for the decaying soul of an unborn monster of ancient times would probably be a personality improvement. However, as I’ve discussed before, the town does not look kindly on bargains with evil things. They turn a blind eye to the campground for the most part since we contain the evil things, but I feel this might cross a line. There’s no direct benefit for the townsfolk, after all. I’m not keeping something away from them. The gummy bears are stuck here already. If anything, I’m throwing innocent people into their maw just to make them stronger.
I don’t think they’d accept it being worth the sacrifice to get rid of the thorns, either. They tend to be rather short-sighted. It would take the thorns consuming the campground and overflowing into their land for them to accept the necessity of such a bargain. I don’t have enough time to wait for that.
And I don’t know… it’s kind of nice to be the heroine sometimes. Maybe this is my father’s legacy coming out. He always wanted to save people.
So I’m going to cheat. That’s one of the strengths of humanity. We can freely use deceit. I just need a willing accomplice.
And I know exactly who to ask. [x]
Read the full list of rules.
Visit the campground's website.

ALL CREDIT GOES TO u/hooman_or_whatever
GME Short Squeeze What Comes Next Part 3
Hello all,
Before I begin I would like to address something I have been encountering on my posts in the comments section. I keep receiving some hate concerning my opinions and I want to be crystal clear that they are just that; opinions. I also want everyone to know that is is meant to be a dialog. I am not trying to pump this stock because truthfully, this goes far beyond us retail investors at this point. What I want is a dialog between all sides to examine this truly fascinating phenomenon that is occurring.
I would also like to clarify something, I am not a bagholder. I do currently hold bags because I own 336 shares at a $194.34 cost basis, however, that total amount is house money that was used from my profits on the first go around.
I also understand some people are tired of hearing about this because it's the same regurgitated form of someone else's post as it keeps circulating in an attempt to retain hype and drive future buying; this is not what this post is about. As investors and individuals involved in the world of finance, this situation should absolutely intrigue us whether or not we are involved. I am here to present my logic on the situation but encourage healthy discussion and debate.
This brings me to my first claim. This is not over. Now, I am not claiming that a squeeze will still occur, I am simply claiming it is not over, for better or for worse. Several things need to take place for this to be completely over, at which point I will either post my gains or my losses from the adventure.
When I say "it" I am referring to this entire phenomenon, not one short squeeze. I do not think these events, "it", is over. This is largely due to retail and institutional purchasing not really changing all that much since we found the bottom and established support at a staggering $60. This support was lost today and found new support at $50. There was very interesting ATH action and I'm not sure what to make of it.
Millions of bag holders (not just WSB) are still holding and in fact, averaging down, thereby purchasing more. These same bag holders are absolutely refusing to sell for such massive losses and in turn are becoming long term investors on the stock if another squeeze isn't to occur. People are picking up speculative positions in the off-chance of another squeeze. Others are determining this as a fair value for the company, not fundamentally, but based on the future prospects of Ryan Cohen and team. Finally, it is nowhere near leaving the global stage with important upcoming dates that we will discuss later.
To examine why it isn't over let's look at both sides of the argument:

1. Bulls claim it's not over for many reasons that you can find in the hundreds of other bullish posts, so I won't bore you with those details. My argument on the bull side is more along the lines of what I listed above.
2. Bears claim it is over because there was a 2250% price increase over the course of two weeks, therefore this must be a short squeeze.

I think we can all agree, bear or bull, that something happened. A 2250% increase certainly isn't nothing. The question is...what? I see several possibilities and would like to discuss them in the comments.

1. The shorts in fact covered and this was a short squeeze.
2. The shorts partially covered and this was a partial short squeeze, but the price increase was mainly hype and gamma squeezes.
3. The shorts didn't cover anything and this was a globally hyped price increase in conjunction with several gamma squeezes.
4. Some combination of the above 3.

First, the data:
Based on morningstar the short interest is showing 78.46%. Now, I think the website is having some issues storing cookies because it will show the outdated 226% unless you open it up in incognito.
Market watch is showing 41.95%
This spread is interesting for sure, my thoughts are some of these calculations are including "synthetic longs" introduced by S3.
It is extremely possible to manipulate these numbers via illegal methods and even legal methods using options. Please see this SEC document to explain how this would work. I am not trying to convince anyone to fit my narrative, but these things occur far more commonly than one would expect. The reasoning is because the fines for committing the crime are far less costly than letting the event take place. Please see FINRA's website for the long, and frequent list of fines being dealt out due to manipulation. A common culprit? Lying about short volume.
Let's use the absolute worst case scenario being reported of 41.95%, which mind you is still extremely high for one stock:
The shorts in fact covered and this was a short squeeze
What's interesting here is even if the shorts 100% covered all of their positions, they very well could have shorted on the way back down. Why wouldn't you? It would be insane to not open a short position when this hit nearly $500 especially if you lost half of your companies money; what better way to get it back? For the remainder of this thesis, I will be assuming that some of the short positions that exist are newly opened positions at a higher price unless someone has a counter-claim as to why that wouldn't be possible/probable.
That would mean 226% was covered on the way up and another 41.95% was reopened on the way back down. Based on the volume and price changes throughout the past two weeks this simply doesn't pass the math check.
The shorts partially covered and this was a partial short squeeze.
Again, using 41.95% this is highly likely and the most reasonable case. Some, probably the worst positions, were covered on the way up.
I think this is precisely what happened, we had some partial shorts covering but for the most part it was gamma squeezes, hype, and FOMO whereby the price started climbing so rapidly it became smarter for the shorts to just wait out the bubble than to actually cover all of their positions.
Again, we fall into a "what-if" scenario regarding shorting on the way back down.
The shorts didn't cover anything and this was a globally hyped price increase in conjunction with several gamma squeezes.
This scenario does not pass the math check using the 41.95% figure.
If the data is being manipulated then this becomes very interesting because if some of the worst positions are still open then that means all of these HF's losses that were reported were strictly interest and they are simply waiting this out for as long as it takes making back their losses on their newly opened short positions in t $300-$400 range.
Sadly, this puts us in the guessing range yet again. We can do the math and see it's possible this scenario exists, however, we would be comparing it against losses reported by the entities that were being squeezed.
There are way to many what-if's for me to me consider this a possibility, but I can't write it off completely.
Some combination of the above 3.
Truthfully, this isn't worth examining just yet. There would be far to many "what-if's" to address, this is something that could be address at the later dates that we will get to shortly.
Now, I've heard it a lot regarding the 02/09 data. "It's two weeks old". Well, that is always the case. The FINRA short data is always two weeks old and suggesting that we can't pull any information from it at all is asinine. Where it gets quite murky, is the data includes 01/27 information. This was a day unlike any other in this saga.
I will take this moment to address the following upcoming catalysts and when I truly think this will be done; one way or the other.
Today's data 02/09, was very important because if it showed an extremely low percentage then we know shorts have exited and did not re-enter and this is completely done. Given the data does not reflect that, we now must turn to several events that could act as catalysts for either a further squeeze or a complete shutdown.
02/19 - In my last post, I discussed the Failure To Deliver (FTD) conundrum. I do need some help figuring out the exact expiration date. From here "The close-out requirement states that a participant of a clearing agency needs to take immediate action to close 4 out a fail to deliver position in a threshold security that has persisted for 13 consecutive settlement days by purchasing securities of like kind and quantity."
The exact date is slightly irrelevant because I highly doubt all of these FTD's are going to deliver on the same exact day. This site, while it isn't an official channel seems to be doing a good job of tracking data. If you want to learn more about FTD's and the implications there please visit that site or review my last post which has links to follow for further reading.
02/18 - Keith Gill aka u/DeepFuckingValue will testify before congress and RH CEO Vladimir will be attending. This can go several ways which can lead to an SEC trading halt on GameStop or with evidence that proves foul play occurred. Who knows? It will certainly be interesting and I don't even to speculate on the market reaction to this even because it could go a ton of different ways; it will be an important date nonetheless
02/24 - The next FINRA short interest information will be made readily available to the public. This will be far more interesting and helpful information because it won't include the insane volatility of January, but it will also highlight the newest short positions. This data will help further drive where I think this is all going to end. It's possible that shorts opened new positions at $50 thinking it was going back to $12. Let's not speculate too much here either, it's just another dataset that will bring light to the direction this is headed.
03/25 - GameStop ER. This is big too for several reasons. First, this will include the console sales cycle which historically has done well for GameStop. A typical buy the hype, sell the news event. It will be interesting to see how the market reacts leading up to this ER, maybe people won't even touch GME leading up to then due to the recent volatility, but if they do, and if there is still a lot of short interest, this too could force shorts to begin covering. Another critical part of this ER is Ryan Cohen. This will be the first time this new board addresses the public with their plans for the future and for the first time since this entire adventure began, the "dying brick and mortar" narrative will finally begin to change in the public eye. That is still the common misconception regarding GameStop, that it is a dying brick and mortar retailer where nothing has changed. This hasn't been the case for around 6 months now, but this will be the first time it is publicly address. The headlines surrounding GameStop's future plans will be very interesting to read and the markets reaction will be far more interesting.
I have been asked a lot what my PT is and when I expect the squeeze to happen, but let me be clear. Very seldom do squeezes "just happen". In fact, short squeezes are far more common than one would think, they just typically happen over months, if not years and the shorts cover on dips so you don't even notice it's happening. In order to force a squeeze, you need to hold a decent amount of shorts underwater. Soon one will crack and start closing their position, this leads to a series of shorts closing their positions skyrocketing the price until more and more shorts need to cover. This is rare.
I hope this narrative of purchasing heavily shorted companies comes to a close soon because a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money simply buying up companies because they are heavily bet against. Catalysts and massive changes need to occur like overhauling your entire business as is the case with GameStop.
Normally, shorts will close their positions one at a time, covering on dips and you don't even notice it's happening. In times where you see a price rise of seemingly no news could very well be shorts closing their positions because their research led them to realize this company is on the road to recovery.
I digress. Given the most recent data and the multiple upcoming catalysts I am still very bullish on a GME short squeeze. My post from quite some time ago illustrated the importance of catalysts regarding a short squeeze, this is still very much the case. The first run was interrupted and the second run won't happen with magic, it requires a catalyst. Another post was titled For those who do not understand the inevitable GME short squeeze, was at the time "inevitable" because math. That is no longer the case. It is no longer inevitable but it is still possible.
I want to be clear: This is not nearly as close to a sure thing as it once was and it depends on a lot of different factors. One of the largest is the people. Granted, a lot of what's happening now is in the hands of institutions but millions of retailers holding their positions to the grave certainly helps the institutional buyers have more faith in their play to continue a squeeze.
SO WHAT DO I THINK
I think shorts certainly covered some of their positions, but not all. I also firmly believe a significant amount of short positions were opened on the way back down by both HF's and individuals. Some certainly positioned high, but based on sentiment, it appears a lot of people think GME is fairly valued around $20 (which I disagree with but let's use that for the time being). That would mean shorts would have no problem opening positions at 100,70,60, even $50.
42% is still very high which means a squeeze is inevitable so long as the company continues in a positive path. However, squeezes typically aren't as abrupt as people think. They are actually quite common, in fact another position I'm heavily invested in is SPCE and they have been going through a squeeze for several weeks and will continue to squeeze so long as news continues to be positive.
How would we get an abrupt short squeeze? A massive bull run. The new shorts that entered at lower levels wouldn't be too hard to catch, however, they are probably low volume, so when they buy to close, it won't be large enough volumes for massive peaks, but a bull run very well could lead to these lower tiered shorts closing, triggering a gamma squeeze. If gamma squeezes are made week over week then shorts at the higher end would have two options:

1. Close early and take profits
2. Wait it out because they are positioned so well that interest means nothing and they don't think there is any hope of us rising to those levels.

In the first case, them closing early would be a nice short squeeze to probably several hundred dollars, but it wouldn't break $1000.
To break $1000 we would need a big bull run to catch the shorts, trigger gamma squeezes, and keep momentum until they are caught and underwater. This is highly unlikely unless there is another global sentiment.
NOTE: ALL OF THESE ASSUMPTIONS I AM MAKING ARE BASED ON THE 42% REPORTING. IF IT IS IN FACT 78% THEN THE POSSIBILITY IS TREMENDOUSLY INCREASED FOR THESE THINGS TO HAPPEN.
SO WHEN DOES IT ALL END
My though is if by the end of March these catalysts were not enough to reignite the hype and squeeze, then it will essentially be over except in the case of a few circumstances:

1. A VW/Porche moment occurs where a large buyer picks up a large portion of the company.
2. Some other currently unknown catalyst appears seemingly out of thin air
3. The data was in fact manipulated. Regardless of what the data says, if the shorts did in fact lie about their short int to take the fine over being squeezed, then they will be squeezed regardless.

It is quite possible, that these catalysts and moments aren't enough to force a squeeze anymore especially if the shorts have repositioned really well. I will retain the mindset that this fateful January 2021 was not a short squeeze. However, that does not mean it will ever actually happen.
SO WHAT IS YOUR PLAY HOOMAN?
Well, I am long on GME which is why I didn't mind hopping back in even at outrageous prices. I will continue averaging down and don't plan on selling for quite some time, probably several years. The reason for this is I believe in Cohen and his team to turn this into something unexpected and I imagine an eventual ROI. Once this is all said and done and I think either the shorts truly have covered or they simply got away with it (Beginning of April), I will be posting my DD for GME as a long play regardless of the squeeze mechanics.
Thank you all for joining me on this wild journey. I hope we can discuss some of these points in the comments like adults and truly try to grasp this wild situation we are all in. There are extremes on both sides from "get over it, the squeeze happened" to a cult like mentality on the other extreme. I hope through discussion we can find the moderate approach and further understand the market mechanics at play.
Thanks for your time
WARNING: Until the squeeze business is over for good, this is a very volatile and risky play. Joining now for the hope of a potential round 2 squeeze should only be done in a speculative manner with money you are willing to lose. This is more akin to a gamble than it is investing. I think the current market price is fair given the future prospects of the company but do your own DD, I will not be releasing any until this squeeze is put to rest.
TL;DR: I am still bullish on this scenario even at 42%, if it really is 78% then I am extremely bullish. There are a plethora of upcoming catalysts that could reignite the squeeze but even if none are powerful enough, with Cohen's new direction we could expect good news for quite some time forcing shorts to exit on a more spread out timeline.
Disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor. I do not wish to sway your opinion in either direction. I simply seek to examine this interesting and volatile situation via crowd sourcing. What you do with your money is entirely up to you.

I want to preface that the contents of this post is for informational purposes. I do not condone or approve of any harassments or witch-hunting or the attacking of anybody.
 
Richard Lewis recently did a stream talking about the terrible state of CS esports and I thought it was an important stream anyone who cares about the CS community should listen to.
Vod Link here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/830415547
I realize it is 3 hours long so I took it upon myself to create a list of interesting points from the stream so you don't have to listen to the whole thing, although I still encourage you to do so if you can.
I know this post is still long but probably easier to digest, especially in parts.
Here is a link to my raw notes if you for some reason want to read through this which includes some omitted stuff. It's in chronological order of things said in the stream and has some time stamps. https://pastebin.com/6QWTLr8T

Intro

• "The last month has convinced me, that we are going to be heading into a dark place for Counter-Strike esports in 2021."
  • "I think I've seen the scene essentially kill itself."
• "For the past 5 to 6 years, we've basically been in a holding pattern of people coming into our game wanting to run it, wanting to run all of the esports and wanting to profiteer and its been sort of a concerted effort to drive them off and push them away."
  • "We're spread way too thin."
• "If Riot don't get involved and stop the scumbags that have moved over to Valorant from getting their feet under the table, Valorant is going to have real problems."
• RL thinks too much has happened all at once for us to do anything except watch it play out, like:
  • Recent CSPPA strike against BLAST
  • ESIC failures and them not being supported enough
  • Teams cheating i.e. coaches/bugs
  • Widespread match fixing
  • The Pandemic
    • "People who try to hold bubble events are so incompetent and fuck up and people get the 'rona and its their fault."
    • "People who say Flashpoint is a bubble is full of shit and is a lie and people are now suffering for that lie."
      • "To save money they let people go home and break the bubble for a week."
      • "Not just Flashpoint peoples decision, they have a partner that handles the production." (hinting FACEIT)
      • "People are trapped in hotels essentially under house arrest because of COVID restrictions and has fucked peoples lives up."
• "It's all too much, all of this incompetence, all of this greed, maybe we ride it out."
  • RL says he has talked to the Riot devs (the ones working on Valorant) and says, "They are so cognizant of all the fuck ups and all the problems we have in Counter-Strike."
    • He continues to say that this is factored into their business plan and that we never had a competitor, but just so happens to have one coincide, when we are at our worst.

CSPPA - Counter-Strike Professional Players' Association

"Who does this union really fucking serve?"

• RL believes that the CSPPA is a mockery.
  
  • He points out the hypocrisy that they wouldn't strike for the pros who were kicked out of ESL Pro League, or for Jamppi or dream3r.
    • He also says ESL paid CSPPA and are racketeering and many other TOs have to pay them to get their "seal of approval"
      • He says they would strong-arm TOs saying "well if you don't give us the money, these guys are so we'll just have to commit to playing their event."
    • Also points out that they will strike against a competitor they are not in agreement with (Flashpoint)
    • RL: "It's what it says about every other time you haven't done it and it's about every time you don't do it now moving forward." "The issues they've chosen to ignore this year alone are embarrassing."
    • Then he points out that there was no strike for Valve qualifiers even if we have no major but Jamppi and dream3r can't play in them.
      • "and Valve have said 'Oh yeah we know actually their stories are accurate, Jamppi didn't cheat, now in a legally binding document. Yep dream3r did have his account hacked in a LAN café', but they still can't play. Where is the fucking solidarity? Gone. Doesn't exist. It's not important [because] it doesn't affect you." "That's what the union does right now, it looks after all the tier 1 people."
• He says the CSPPA doesn't represent all players all the time and has driven a divide where you have the haves and have-nots
  
  • "We have a tier of players that operate with impunity and do not help their tier 2 or tier 3 players out at all." "If you are not a tier 1 player you do not matter, they don't event ask your opinion."
  • He tells chrisJ to admit and own the fact that the reason he didn't speak up during the ESL Pro League debacle is because it didn't affect him
  • "They are looking after some players at the expense of other players. How the fuck is that a union?"
• He says the BLAST situation is a reasonable dispute and supports the players but is not the right time for a strike and have not even identified the correct enemy
  
  • He thinks players are lashing out now due to previous incidents and are upset that BLAST are working with ESIC
    • He stated that CSPPA shouldn't beefing with ESIC and they should be working in harmony
  • He says what they need to do is talk with the teams/organizations that have sold that right to BLAST
    • RL: "Your employers, the people who pay you that massive exorbitant salaries, when you don't stream and you don't do interviews and you offer no value beyond your ability to click heads and you get 25k dollars a month." "Why don't you talk to them about it? Oh right. You're happy to take away BLAST's paper, but you don't want to risk your own."
  • "I am seeing such unbelievable cowardice from the players here with the battles you choose."
  • "Where was the strike action when in the qualifiers for the world championship, there were teams and players engaged in huge conflicts of interest?" "Where was the strike action when your image rights were taken and sold to every league you've ever been in every union type organization you've ever been associated with like, WESA, to your org every time you sign a contract, to the leagues you play in."
    • "Your image rights are essentially worthless now, there's about 10 fucking separate parties that have them, and how many of them are giving you anything for it? Not much pretty much your org by the way."
    • "That's a big issue. Your image is you, your image is your brand. What are you doing about that? Nothing."
• He is also angry at SirScoots who is "popping off" at people on Twitter who all want the same thing, which is 'A unified Counter-Strike scene for everybody, that works for everybody, that has a sustained ecosystem that nourishes everybody.' "We don't have that now."
  
• He also says their rankings are a joke
  
  • "Just so happened, oh look TACO, that very important prominent member of the board, we pushed his team artificially up when they weren't even in the fucking top 20, not by a long shot."
• He also says the ineptitude of the CSPPA cost Flashpoint a monitor sponsor
  
• "Is it really a player association or is it like a fucking agency at this point"
  

ESIC - Esports Integrity Commission

"They have been put in an impossible position."

• RL says that Ian Smith, the founder of ESIC and who was done work in mainstream sports, is a good and honorable man who has dedicated his life to integrity and sports. He takes on both sides, ensuring match fixers are punished, but also doing appeals and ensuring those punishments were fair.
• "ESIC is a tiny organization" and are in need of money, "They didn't run a grift like the CSPPA did."
  • "Saying 'you want our support and you want the players to turn up you better pay us.' They don't do that."
  • "Had startup seed money from MTG and since then they've been pecking shit with the hens."
    • Ian Smith made sure that the money given by MTG (Modern Times Group, parent company of ESL, ESEA, DreamHack) was nothing more than startup money and wouldn't be in debt to them
      • Ian Smith sat down with other TO's not part of MTG and wanted to partner with them. They declined and called ESIC "ESL spies and we will never align ourselves with you"
  • "They only were just able to afford, hiring a PR guy on a full time salary to deal with the press and send out those releases you've seen, this year."
    • "They have a tiny group of staff investigating these things and they have taken on the biggest problems in our scene: the cheating, the match fixing."
• ESIC have had "unprecedented levels of cheating to deal with, because there's something wrong with our scene ever since we went online. There's something wrong with it, everyone's lost their fucking pride and self-respect and they got no passion for it anymore, so they think fuck it, what's in it for me?"
  • He calls out coaches who are talking about players rights when they would rob and steal from them.
    • Also says more coaches being banned are coming
    • He also points out flaws in community's reaction to the punishments to coaches bans: "Half of the cunts still have jobs and some of the cunts got new jobs. We didn't even shun the cheating coaches."
• ESIC have "found I think another 2 or 3 exploits like that one and they are investigating them all right now, it's going on right now."
  
  • "I know that there are going to be more names getting banned, again."
  • "So they're doing that on a skeleton crew while, investigating 3 continents worth of match fixing in MDL and semi-pro level CS." "They're doing this with half a dozen people." "They don't have any money or any help. People barely even fucking cooperate with them, they are treated like pariahs. It's ridiculous."
    • "Why are the CSPPA popping off at ESIC on my Twitter timeline, when you should be working together." "because its all about what's in it in for me." "2020, the online era of CS: 'What is in it for me?' How can I cheat, how can I get my paper, how can I bleed this scene one last time before I fuck off and play shooty shooty bang bang Riot Games babys first fps."
• RL says that in the CIS region, teams have gone to tournaments and have been eliminated multiple times by the same team. We found out they were cheating and those players who lost, have been cut from their roster, careers ended because of cheaters.
  

Stream Sniping

"They're all at it in the online era, they're all at it, they're all cheating, they're all using exploits, probably that see through smoke bug got used a bunch of times"

• RL talks about how there is no integrity from dead (the player), always denying when caught doing something
  • On the topic of 'BLAST never said we couldn't stream snipe': "Lies, BLAST never said you could do that, they had to sort of retcon it." "because what happened after that they fucking started snitching and squealing"
    • "Suddenly you had like, 10 of the top 15 teams in the world, staring into the abyss of being banned for 6-12 months in line with ESIC recommendations."
      • He says that ESIC was put in a tough situation and couldn't enforce the bans because it would have resulted in killing CS. What resulted was, BLAST, ESIC, and teams came together and gave them a warning and told them, in RL's words "don't do this again or you're gonna get got."
        • He then says the top teams brushed this off and didn't give a fuck
        • The new MiBR team playing Flashpoint, that wasn't involved in the previous incidents are doing it again (stream sniping). He gave credit to Flashpoint for the quick resolution and punishment and respect for cogu's response to the situation.
        • "ESIC came out and said, once more, 'Guys, zero tolerance from now on.'" RL then got upset at community's reaction calling ESIC "pussies" for their non enforcement and said if we want competitive CS we cant ban the top 10 teams.
• He points out how players have no integrity and will do anything for an edge as long as they won't get detected or banned or it's within a grey area.
• "All of this shit was mad avoidable, even in the pandemic era."
  • He talks about why aren't we filming them. Why aren't there representatives for leagues and tournaments making sure players aren't cheating?

Match Fixing

"How many years have we let our scene be fucking pillaged by these greedy cunts?" "We just let it happen."

• RL says that gambling and skins betting which existed in moderation was "accelerated and blown up by the Call of Duty greedy fucks."
  • "Never forget TmarTn was on the board of EnVyUs." "His website, CSGOLotto, they had a bunch of off-the-books sponsorships." "NBK promoted them. People forget."
• "Those people who had access to the skins, go to the players" "Even people like s1mple, best player in the world, even he scammed knives and skins off fucking fans."
• Owners of skin casino sites would approach pros and lend them skins to use in tournaments and possibly keep them after reaching a deal
  • Players would tip off inside info about matches and teams in exchange for skins. Info such as: roster changes, how they played in scrims
    • They would use this info to bet and subvert the odds on their sites. "That happened religiously, I can't even tell you how many times it happened."
      • "I had access to the biggest database of information, from an inside betting circle in NA, and it would take information and screenshots from other pro players, who were feeding them info in exchange for money or skins."
        • "Some of these players are still playing." "Incredibly, there are players still in the CSPPA today, complaining about the BLAST recordings, that were embroiled in this murky shit back then."
• RL also says that there were tournaments where teams contrived with each other, who should throw, who should win.
• "There's a handful of people that are trying to fucking clean it up, and you think you get something over the line and you see something like the CSPPA and it's run by corrupt fucking chuckle heads, and now you've got another corrupt body you have to fight on a fucking daily basis, it's demoralizing."
  • "It's too far gone. Our entire semi-professional scene is compromised."
• "It's rife guys, I'm not going to lie any more. It's not just China, it's not just Russia, it's here, it's NA, it's Europe, it's Australia, so much more than you think, so much more than we can prove."
  • "I get sent chat logs all the time […] and they're morons, these players, short-sighted, amateur, morons and they're doing it on WhatsApp." People would get cut from the bets because they want to make more money, then they leak the logs. He says, from the chat logs, they spread "little" bets across every site they can (400 to 1k dollars) to prevent shifting odds
• He says the scumbags who've fucked off to Valorant will do the same there if Riot doesn't do something and says Valorant "is an esports scene heading for a very early fall based on the sheer volume of scumbags that are already there."
• "That's tier 2 CS in a nutshell these days. They know they're never going to play in a major, so what's the punishment?"
  • "All of these tier 2 fucks that are fixing games now they are like the fucking mafia compared to iBuyPower" "These guys are working with organized criminals to fix entire seasons worth of games. That's what's going on in your tier 2 CS."
• "I'm literally being told that there are players fixing games at all levels of Chinese esports and motherfuckers with guns are turning up to team houses and stuff."

North America

"Everyone in NA has left we've lost a continents worth of support during this pandemic and Valve haven't said a fucking word."

• RL says the Call of Duty "goblins" that destroyed CS for years are the same people who are now trying to leave CS. "The nerve to treat a game where the fans, and the community, and the TO's were nothing but good to you." "To just kick the players out now and go and leave and say 'It just doesn't make financial sense.' Oh you'll slither back when we have a major though for them stickers won't you."
• There's a cascading effect in NA where people don't bother with CS anymore and people like Chaos suffer.
• He says NA team owners are incompetent for always wanting it easy and always wanting a guarantee on their investment without skill or nuance.
  • RL says he would be able to market a team correctly and would have a good ROI and also points out how TSM wouldn't even be bothered to tweet that their team, which was one of the best in the world, was playing at the Major.
  • He also says not all NA owners are like that, compliments and respects Jason Lake who nearly lost everything to keep Complexity going.
• He then calls out the incompetence in Infinite Esports when they acquired OpTic Gaming and bought an Indian CS team.
  • He says HECZ is not to blame here and that they couldn't tell forsaken was cheating when it was so obvious.
    • They measured his reaction time to the likes of dev1ce and s1mple
    • When an enemy showed up on his screen he won that duel something like 44% of the time
    • "was like the number 1 player in the world statistically"
    • He brought a laptop to their bootcamp and refused to use the high end PCs that hey provided
• He respects Andy Miller (NRG CEO) and HECZ but says that the attitude of not being able to easily monetize their teams is "piss weak" and there needs to be a risk.
  • He says Chaos EC shouldn't be cutting their roster and should be competent enough to be able to figure out how to make money off their team.
• He says there are still opportunities in NA and people are panicking and pulling out, and says Valorant will be the same if not worse.
  • He also says "bums" who couldn't even get out of groups in NA competitions, are making crazy money in Valorant and says it will continue to inflate.
• He also said that he heard rumors that EG (Evil Geniuses) are done.
• He also thinks that the rumors of a Valve franchised league from before was sparked up from "these lazy fabled weak NA fucking team owners basically trying to see if Valve would bite at the hook if it was dangled and they didn't"
  • Slasher says NA team owners are really in favor of franchised leagues because they want to make more money. "Most of the powerful team owners right now are on board with ditching this third party organization structure, or they are trying to play this power politics with all the TOs, and that is contributing to a lot of the problems there"
• RL says that Riot has proved they can run a franchised league (LCS) and will be profitable in 2021 which is what a lot of team owners care about and says the competition will only serve to snatch people away from CS.
• RL continues to say, "I am so sick and tired of what we have done to this scene, I am just exhausted with it." "I think we have legitimately fucked it, I really think we have. I think we're staring into almost like a CGS (Championship Gaming Series) wasteland in NA." "Counter-Strike esports is a fucking joke."

Talent

"TO's have treated CS talent like absolute human garbage for years now."

• RL says that people like Sean Gares and ddk switching over to Valorant isn't for financial reasons because they are making less over there.
• He points out that TO's can't even give talent a 3 month in advance calendar.
• Because of the pandemic TO's won't hire certain people and some people are working more hours for the same money.
• He says we as a community don't respect journalists enough which is why we don't have good journalists.
  • He also says DeKay is leaving the scene soon and that Thorin is close to leaving also
• He says he had to talk a caster down from quitting and was struggling to find reasons.
• He says that DreamHack told Vince they would hire him but not if he wants to stick with dusT and says that this is the norm in esports. "Constant leveraging of people against each other." and says this is why we don't have a talent union.
• New gen casters are getting put into shit situations and the community's reaction to them is adding fuel to the fire
• He says the reason Moses left was because of the terrible conditions
• He says that Anders had to constantly leave his family and kid because someone fucked up or broke promises and had to constantly tell his kid to their face that "daddy can't be home this weekend."
• He says that esports has always been a lie to sell you this dream, "Meanwhile there's about 2% of the cunts getting all the checks."

Valve

"Anything that Riot does, is better than Valve's inaction"

• Slasher says that the larger aspect of esports as a whole compared to other entertainment mediums and Valve's lack of inattention are the bigger problems. He continues saying that the fact that Valve let their game be ran as an esport, they need to take on the responsibilities of it.
  • Both Slasher and RL wants Valve to take control but not on the level of Riot Games, there needs to be a balance.
• In case it was ever a question: Gabe Newell has been to 0 CSGO Majors.
• RL calls Valve out saying they could have done something during the gambling era.
• He says Valve used to come to the majors, but doesn't think they do anymore.
• RL had met with Valve at the Cluj-Napoca Major and had tried to appeal iBP's indefinite punishment and had also gave Brax's life story:
  • A recent family member passed away, they had lost a lot of income, they had to live in trailer, iBuyPower did not pay any salaries, and was pressured by family to make money who didn't support his career.
  • RL said that Valve told him, "How dare you try and make us feel guilty." "We shouldn't feel bad about enforcing the only thing that matters that we need to make players afraid of: cheating and match fixing"
  • RL also tried to share other info about match fixing and nothing came of it
• RL points out that Source 2 or a new engine is not something you will want based on the experience of transitioning from CS 1.6 to CS:S. "Valve's track record with brand new engines being launched, not fucking great from what I remember."
• Slasher says "If there is anything the community should do, is pressure Valve to hire a community manager."
  • They say that we need a commissioner, a community manager (not the person who runs the Twitter who posts memes all day), then we need to have a circuit
• RL reiterates that Valve doesn't care about CS esports and says they need to change the culture at Valve to make them care about CS esports
  • Slasher says a systemic problem is making it so working on CSGO would be a bad decision for you as an employee for Valve
• He also hasn't talked to Valve in ages and have sent over bugs and cheats and doesn't get emails back anymore
• Slasher says we should be directing attention at the developer leads, pointing out Ido Magal, if he even is still the project lead
  • RL thinks that Ido and Brian are the only people that "vaguely even give a fuck about CS" and were the only people that RL recalled that actually read Reddit and paid attention from time to time
• "It is really fucking precarious. Somebody has got to step the fuck up and start giving a shit"
  • Slasher suggests org owners, with CSPPA, with ESIC, with TOs have a concerted effort against Valve
• "Riot Games are doing better things than Valve in the esports space" which is something RL didn't think he'd say.
• "People who used to be talent, working with unions, arguing with other talent, when the unions fucked them over, can't understand their perspective, TOs fucking over broadcast talent, broadcast talent wanting to leave and go and work for orgs, orgs having no money, Valve might take coaches away because all the coaches are cheating, ESIC has about 4 people in a fucking call doing the investigations, everyone thinks they're spies for ESL, ESL are just the evil fucking overlords wanting to rule the scene and will just somehow, like cockroaches outliving a nuclear bomb, and Valve are in a fucking holiday in Hawaii thinking about the next Dota character because they don't give a fuck about us."

Closing Statements

"We've peaked. If we want to sustain and exist, now is the time to figure it out. No esports lasts as long as this, we've already done 8 years. We've already broke the records. We have got to figure out a way to coexist and drive the negative forces out and we need to do it as a collective and we're not doing that."

• RL compared the Counter-Strike scene to the people on the Titanic who ran around with guns robbing people while the boat was sinking.
• "We have given up on being a respectable esports scene." "We are now a conduit to make money for those who want to just milk it, just have one last ride, one last roll of the dice. It's done." "What a fucking mess. What have we done to our fucking scene?"
• "There's just too much self-interest driving all of this." "I don't see a way we stop the dominoes." "When it's that bad, when there's that many dishonest people that ESIC have to come out and say that if we punish them all there's no one left. What does that tell you?"
• "How many opportunities have we had to clean house? How many times have we said, 'this must never happen again', and another scandal." "The entire skins betting operations was the biggest criminal conspiracy in esports ever executed and no one has been punished for it." "The people who could be driving that don't want to."
• "Right now people are fans of those organizations because the scene has value. It is worth being a fan of Astralis because they are excellent at Counter-Strike. It is worth being a fan of s1mple because he is the best player in Counter-Strike, maybe the exception of ZywOo. If the scene is devalued, if the scene loses its meaning, those things lose its meaning too, and people will leave, people will stop tuning into the games. I have seen it happen in multiple esports, this is not my first time at the rodeo. I am getting big Brood War vibes right now and I don't like it."
• "The role you play in all of this as fans, as viewers, as listeners, as consumers of esports content, it's absolutely imperative that you know who the good guys are. It's absolutely imperative that you use your voice. It's absolutely imperative that when things are bad, you know who, at least, is trying to make them good, and you have to apply your criticism to the right targets."
  • He continues saying it's no good in continuing to attack ESIC and saying how they are bad, ESIC have it hard
• He says CSPPA are on the right side of the argument on BLAST but have been on the wrong side of many arguments many times.
  • "If you are not willing to stand along side the weakest member of the union, with the least amount of influence, and the least amount of power, then it is not a union at all and you shouldn't pose as one." "You wanna serve a bunch of special interest do it, everyone else in esports fucking does, but do not pose as something you are not." "We love the players. I've been fighting for players rights for as long as I've been able to, but the CSPPA is not what we needed."
    • "They are not applying the pressure to the right people, they are not fighting the right battles, they are not helping their weaker members."
• He says what orgs have done by keeping or hiring coaches is bad. "When you give up on holding an appreciable standard, you've lost the scene" "Competition matters, rules matter, punishments matter, achievements matter, excellence matters" "If you start stripping that away, you have nothing" "You guys need to take that knowledge and apply it sensibly."
• "Valve has sold you all down the river, they sold everyone in the esports scene down the river, tournament organizers are selling their talent down the river. Don't hate on them for sounding tired after a 16 hour day. Don't hate on them because the hype for a matchup they've seen for the 20th time in the past 3 months, they can't be as excited or it sounds contrived. Support your guys, they're there for you, these are your people."
• "This community has got to start acting like one for the first fucking time. Just put the petty shit away, let's try and fix this fucking scene while we still have one to save."
• "You can't rely on Valve, you can't rely on ESL, you can't rely on the CSPPA, you can't rely on anyone." "Once again, it's gonna be the likes of us, the amateurs, the people who give a fuck, rolling up our sleeves and grafting." "I'm old and tired and I don't want to have to do it again. People need to pick up the torch and do it."
  • "Like Michal did, like Dudenhoeffer did. You see something wrong, fix it. You see somebody doing something wrong, call it out. If you think something could be better, let people know."
• "Vote with your wallets if you're not happy with the direction Valve goes in. If when we do get to the Major, they serve up another subpar, same old bullshit stickers and signatures package again, do not buy it."
  • "You're a powerful block and if you use it correctly we can fucking avert this disaster."
• "I'm not doing another year in this broken, bust-up fucking scene, where everyone is miserable, everyone is broke, everyone is tired, and everyone is trying to fucking rob everyone else, blind, while the fucking people who are meant to be protecting you, are just fucking enhancing it and lining their own pockets."
  • "I'm not doing it anymore and you shouldn't want to do it either."
• "I stand by every fucking thing I said. I mean it, because this game fucking matters to me, this scene fucking matters to me. I put my life into this, my adult life, and to see it in this state is fucking sad."