Thanks to the GameStop defense, hedge fund short sellers have lost nearly 27x more in the last month alone than all short sellers combined did in the average month last year.
Wall Street investors are sitting on estimated year-to-date losses of $70.87 billion on their bets against U.S. companies following massive surges in some of the heavily shorted shares, data from analytics firm Ortex showed on Thursday.
Some shares such as in video game retailer GameStop have jumped more than 1,000{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} in the past week, driven primarily by retail investors trading on online apps and sharing tips on social media messaging boards
Such gains have forced short-sellers to buy back stock to cover potential losses in what is dubbed a short-squeeze. Moves were exacerbated by more retail investors piling into the stock.
Ortex data showed that as of Wednesday, there were loss-making short positions on more than 5,000 U.S. firms.
Shorting GameStop may have cost $1.03 billion year-to-date, Ortex estimates, while those shorting Bed, Bath & Beyond were looking at a $600 million loss.
Its short interest data, sourced from submissions by agent lenders, prime brokers, and broker-dealers, showed that around 62 million GameStop shares with a value of $2.2 billion were out on loan as of Wednesday.
To put this in perspective, the average monthly profit/loss for short sellers in 2020 was $2.7 billion. Now you know why Wall Street is shrieking like little girls for the government to stop the public from being able to do what they do.
One thing is clear from all of this. The America public is not going to support another bank bailout once the next financial crisis begins. They’d rather see Wall Street burn, and rightly so.