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Here's a 2-year comparison of GME, BTC, and MSTR.

I feel it is plausible GME is caught in 5 short trades right now.

1. 7-year console cycle trade (might be a basket).
2. Bankruptcy basket since ~2014-2015.
3. BTC basket since early 2025.
4. Convertible Arb (Bond Desks) since late March 2025.
5. M&A Arb (eBay deal) since April 1, 2026.

There could be others but what each of these do is cause competing short interest via various strategies. For example, Bond Desks are a given, 100% confirmation. Upon buying the bonds they shorted the stock. SI went up, CTB up, utilization up. Puts landed all over the chain, etc.

The rest are speculative but you can imagine there likely always exists some rationale to do these style of trades on GME. Either direct short, two-legged stock-option, or even two-stock (Chewy-GME as an example), or multi-stock via either an ETF or custom basket.

And we have various examples of all these things showing up over the years, especially custom baskets based on ETFs (from the Archegos files).

So my thought today is we are getting hammered alongside all the other BTC treasury stocks.

Which makes sense, realistically. GameStop holds 4,710 BTC and is the 20th biggest BTC treasury company. So BTC goes down, GME goes down. Easy trade to just throw us in the basket and push us down alongside everybody else.

But that's a very crowded short-side trade for such a small company. Would explain why for much of the time I've been following the stock, Short Volume Percent has been so high. Aside from just after the ATMs in 2024, shorts are doing the vast majority of the trading on this stock - either shorting or buying to close, then re-opening the trade later. All the data tells me that shorts are just continuing to hammer this thing on all sides, recycle their positions, and incrementally nibbling at their cost basis, scraping profit where they can even if upside-down elsewhere. Just like an efficient long would be doing.

But the company has successfully restored its operation, EPS is no longer negative, so PE is no longer undefined, but instead 15. GameStop with a PE of 15 is pretty remarkable to be honest. And while it isn't at the 175% (lol) institutional ownership of early 2020, it is up from 22% in 2024 to 44%+ today.

So while I have no idea what household investors are doing (DRS has dropped), I do know that institutions are buying while price is flat over 24 months. So where are institutions getting shares in the last year?

Probably short sellers, right?
But Short Interest isn't going up.
Which I find a bit curious.
So maybe household is finally getting shaken out?

Part of my thesis has long been that institutions would go long. Media would eventually switch to darling mode (because they are corporate propaganda). But somewhere along the way they'd need to shake out as many people as possible, because the long side was simply too crowded for them to get their place at the table.

But that still supposes Supply and Demand are fixed and I've also long believed that Supply and Demand don't make sense in a market with short selling in any capacity because the balloon can be blown up as big as people want to pay for it (thus the 175% ownership in 2020). The tug of war is what markets want because they don't care about anything but liquidity, trades, volume. They want to see trades moving on the tape because trades = fees and fees are the lifeblood of a market, not people holding shares or shorts forever.

In a market where everybody holds, there's no long volume. So you need short volume to generate trades.

But the volume is gone again. And that typically happens in these moments.

And the simplest explanation of what happens next and why is that somebody short closes up shop, buys-to-close. Not forever, but for awhile. Because they know that whoever is taking their turn at pushing this thing down by whatever date using whatever means, is not wanting to push much longer or lower. (Cautionary note: we have seen them push very long and far on low volume at times.)

So some short closes in some random burst of volume, either by buying back a massive tranche of short calls, closing out some massive puts, refilling an ETF, or un-shorting an ETF or the stock directly, something happens. CHX volume or something goes crazy. Everybody starts screaming. Everybody that was waiting for the mythical $17 target panics and buys. The rally starts, and the momentum flips, drawing in the options energy from momentum traders.

But that first short to buy-to-close a chunk of their position got the best price point, they wiped the order book, took all the cheapest options at an 8-year IV floor, and front ran the entire world.

And if I were them, I'd probably be pretty good at this and have really deep pockets so I'd probably say, well you know what. Instead of simply buying-to-close our X position, why not also buy-to-open here at the same time another X? Close a bag and buy another.

Because then you are switching from delta short to delta neutral to delta long and you can dump those cheap shares and options on everybody in 11 days.

I don't know. Just some thoughts.

Make good decisions!
(I still don't know what those are.)

Love you all. Christ is King!