Board 8 > Stock Topic 36

(+) Yeah! (+)

EVRI alert! Get in before it pops up to $22 again tomorrow.

No Tyde announcement from BBIG yesterday, meaning record date can't be 4/14. A bit disappointing for me as that combined with the massive options chain would have been a huge pump and I have a lot of 4/14 options

Now that being said for longs 4/22 is probably better. You still get the option chain run up and then shorting after that run up is still risky for a week. Good deterrent.

Hoping progression is

Earnings Call sometime this week. Hopefully Thursday after hours
Tyde announcement Friday pre-market with record date 4/22.

Could happen. May not. Still think the stock runs to $7-$8 by 4/14 either way.

I hope youre right man. Youve been on that for a long time.

Well even if it doesn't pop I'm not dead

It's the difference between 6 figures and 7 figures at this point.

If I'm still here in July then I worry.

You want a great example of the market being irrational

ANY had a merger in the works with gryphon mining. They canceled it yesterday. The stock dumped 30% then surged 100% so the bad news pumped the stock 30%

Moonroof posted...

Speaking of taxes, I made around $320k profit in 2021. In order to yield that much I had to invest/risk about 99% of my money at a time. The problem was that because I made so much money, I had to pay 35% in taxes. So that means I risked 99% of my funds for at best a 65% gain, whereas I probably could have invested/risked 60% of my money for a much similar gain (I didnt do the math so I could be off a bit). When you look at it like that, it makes you wonder why bother investing all your money.

I think for years like 2020 and 2021, your strategy was fine. For most years and down times, you really should just try to think of your investing in a different fashion.

One way to think of it is... if you take your profits over the last 2 years, and invest them at 6%, how many years until that profit ends up being a million dollars? If you had 250k in profit, that's a million bucks in 24 years.

that's a fairly conservative way to think about it but at the same time compounding interest is such a good friend if he's on your side. and you have capital, so, he's on your side :)

Well Im getting crushed on EVRI. It will rebound though. I strongly recommend people buy this dip.

Blood in the water

Volume drying up

This is looking just like January. Wish I had money that's coming Friday now lol

Bloodbath for real!

Down to 2.70 now on a stock where I have calls expiring at strikes 3.5, 4, 5, 8, 10, 13 in less than a week

Still not concerned about any but the 10s and 13s

This must be what madness feels like

My ultra instinct is tingling

$2.69, but we will finish well over $3 today. I averaged down heavily on my 3.5c for next week.

It's diverging from IWM and other memes.

Gap up Monday I can taste it !!

Lol man I think you need to let go of it.

Meh.

The only thing that has changed about my theory is that the price hasn't moved. Options are still there. IV is still going up. This stock has run multiple hundreds of percentage points in the past in a matter of days. I'll like my chances. Only put in a few hundred more but because of decay that increased my position considerably.

Loaded up some shares this morning. Only going to float them a few days. If it goes to $7 like I think it'll be an easy +3k though

Crazy that everyday starts big green and ends red.

I kinda don't think we're really going to recover until the S&P reaches an official bear market.

I feel like that already happened a month ago? Unless you're saying that we need to stay in it for a while for it to actually reverse

Anyway there is some talk about inflation rates today is the latest fear spreading tool. We'll see how it all goes. Still haven't sold any BBIG calls or shares, still think it's going to go on a total tear either Wednesday or Thursday (following the money-- institutions own this gamma ramp not retail) but we'll see.

The Nasdaq briefly touched official bear market territory. The S&P and Dow haven't gotten there yet. Usually the S&P is treated as the benchmark by which everything is measured these days.

Also, Lopen, the inflation stuff has nothing to do with fear spreading on BBIG. The whole market is obsessed with inflation. Even people with no investments are talking about inflation. BBIG is a drop in the ocean so if anyone is actually saying that people are talking up inflation to drive BBIG down, it sounds like they are just trying to sell you their BBIG shares.

I'm talking about the market tanking in general. Inflation is the latest excuse after the war and the coronavirus and whatever else. None of it really matters all that much as the market is acting.

BBIG just goes down with any excuses to go down. I'm numb to it at this point and you're right it has nothing to do with anything.

It will hurt if it doesn't move this week though.

Inflation (read: quantitative tightening), war, and disease are all legitimate reasons for the market to move. Why shouldn't these things affect the value of stocks?

Usually bear markets are a good time to buy but these things are legit causes for a bear market to exist in the first place.

On a broad strokes level yes. Over time these should cause specific stocks to decrease, and even broader indexes if many of the contained stocks lose value. For instance the coronavirus tanking travel stocks was totally legitimate. The coronavirus tanking I don't know like, Tesla? Is it real or is it just market makers and hedge funds attempting to induce mass hysteria?

Biden giving us a speech we knew was coming and having a deep red day isn't logical though. News events simply don't matter on a day to day level like that-- people thinking they do is why active traders lose money in the stock market on average. It's all an elaborate psychological game and you only win if you know the rules and have the fortitude to play them out.

Lopen posted...

On a broad strokes level yes. Over time these should cause specific stocks to decrease, and even broader indexes if many of the contained stocks lose value. For instance the coronavirus tanking travel stocks was totally legitimate. The coronavirus tanking I don't know like, Tesla? Is it real or is it just market makers and hedge funds attempting to induce mass hysteria?

Biden giving us a speech we knew was coming and having a deep red day isn't logical though. News events simply don't matter on a day to day level like that-- people thinking they do is why active traders lose money in the stock market on average. It's all an elaborate psychological game and you only win if you know the rules and have the fortitude to play them out.

On a market level absolutely the coronavirus should have caused almost everything to plummet. If not for the Fed intervening with massive QE the whole economy goes into a deep recession and doesn't do the V-shaped recovery it did. When the market figured out that the Fed was indeed going to provide unlimited QE, it made a V-shaped recovery very quickly.

All investments are correlated because people are choosing where to invest based on comparing their options. If Company A remains the same it was but Company B is suddenly a better value because the price plunged, they'll sell A stock and buy B. That causes A stock to go down without any deterioration in the underlying company. It's perfectly logical.

On a day to day level, the market is very swingy but on the level of a month (which reflects both March 2020 and March 2022 with the pandemic and war) the reaction to major news is pretty sensible. The problem with trading daily news is that trading daily news after it has come out doesn't get you any advantage over the market since everyone already knows the news. And you can't trade news before it comes out because you don't have it.

I think the market does have some inertia in response to big news. The coronavirus plunge took a month to play out. Now you won that trade if you got out early. You got hit with the worst of both worlds if you got out late. And lots of people did, because they felt hysterical fear, and they lost because of that. Doesn't make sense to blame market makers and hedge funds for that though. They didn't cause that to happen.

My whole point is they absolutely caused that. They saw an opportunity to crash the market and jumped on it. Now with the rise of the retail investor it's just an endless string of excuses to dump stocks-- but if people were actually selling stocks you'd see different price action. It wouldn't be a super volatile jagged line.

Let's ignore Tesla. Let's look at Apple or Microsoft. They both dumped 30% when Coronavirus fear was at its peak. Why would that happen. Thinking about you as a person, why does a virus make you lose faith in your investment. Is the coronavirus going to make computers stop being used? Is their bottom line really going to matter all that much? Their profits just kept going up-- you want to say it's all the fed pumping money into it that allowed those companies which shouldn't have cared about a pandemic to increase profit margins be my guest but I really don't think so.

Also the ramifications of Russia to anyone but Russia are completely overblown

We are going to have some difficulty with fuel (not enough to justify the huge rate increase at the pump though) and some difficulty with food and agriculture related stuff.

That's not going to crash the economy, and inflation sure as hell isn't either.

It's just a big ball of manipulation. Buy the dip and win or stay out because it's a sham anyway. Whichever.

Lopen posted...

My whole point is they absolutely caused that. They saw an opportunity to crash the market and jumped on it. Now with the rise of the retail investor it's just an endless string of excuses to dump stocks-- but if people were actually selling stocks you'd see different price action. It wouldn't be a super volatile jagged line.

Let's ignore Tesla. Let's look at Apple or Microsoft. They both dumped 30% when Coronavirus fear was at its peak. Why would that happen. Thinking about you as a person, why does a virus make you lose faith in your investment. Is the coronavirus going to make computers stop being used? Is their bottom line really going to matter all that much? Their profits just kept going up-- you want to say it's all the fed pumping money into it that allowed those companies which shouldn't have cared about a pandemic to increase profit margins be my guest but I really don't think so.

I'm not sure what you mean. How did they cause the stocks to go down without selling them? Stock prices only respond to supply and demand, bids and asks.

And the logic holds for Apple and Microsoft the same as for Tesla. Why keep holding Apple when you can sell your Apple to buy EVRI at the bottom and make 15x your money? In addition, if the whole economy crashes we are going to be a poorer country and a poorer world and that means less money will be available to spend on Apple and Microsoft products. If we really had a big crash like that these companies aren't going to be spared.

There has been a major rise in the correlation of different stocks in the past few decades and a big part of that is probably the rise of algorithmic trading. So during the pandemic, that's probably a big part of why Amazon initially fell too - the algorithms just said, all stocks must move together so this one must be sold too. But the algorithms that did that lost on that trade, because they couldn't take a step back and realize that Amazon would be one of the least affected companies.

Lopen posted...

Also the ramifications of Russia to anyone but Russia are completely overblown

We are going to have some difficulty with fuel (not enough to justify the huge rate increase at the pump though) and some difficulty with food and agriculture related stuff.

That's not going to crash the economy, and inflation sure as hell isn't either.

It's just a big ball of manipulation. Buy the dip and win or stay out because it's a sham anyway. Whichever.

What manipulation? That's what I don't get. You're saying that hedge funds are like Russian propagandists, that they are subtly influencing retail to sell stocks?

The market maker has some degree of freedom to fabricate buying and selling in the name of liquidity.

Short selling exists as a thing regardless of whether you believe short squeeze hype or not.

If you want to actually sell a stock you're not shorting it, you're selling it.

Also with payment for order flow existing as a thing, prices can move in ways because brokers are routing your orders sequences selectively in ways that make the price move in the way they want it to. For instance if one guy sells 100 shares at $2.72, and two guys buy 100 shares at $2.73, if you resolve the $2.72 last the price shows as $2.72. All people get their shares but the price shown doesn't reflect what supply and demand is.

Also for your Apple to Evri example, the prices as a whole (indexes) shouldn't decrease if people are reinvesting funds. If people are taking money out of the market the total value of the market decreases, so the market goes down. Otherwise you would logically just be moving money out of Apple into Evri. One market cap goes down the other up.

red sox 777 posted...

What manipulation? That's what I don't get. You're saying that hedge funds are like Russian propagandists, that they are subtly influencing retail to sell stocks?

Not subtly but yes.

Lopen posted...

The market maker has some degree of freedom to fabricate buying and selling in the name of liquidity.

Short selling exists as a thing regardless of whether you believe short squeeze hype or not.

If you want to actually sell a stock you're not shorting it, you're selling it.

Also with payment for order flow existing as a thing, prices can move in ways because brokers are routing your orders sequences selectively in ways that make the price move in the way they want it to. For instance if one guy sells 100 shares at $2.72, and two guys buy 100 shares at $2.73, if you resolve the $2.72 last the price shows as $2.72. All people get their shares but the price shown doesn't reflect what supply and demand is.

Also for your Apple to Evri example, the prices as a whole (indexes) shouldn't decrease if people are reinvesting funds. If people are taking money out of the market the total value of the market decreases, so the market goes down. Otherwise you would logically just be moving money out of Apple into Evri. One market cap goes down the other up.

The whole market would lose value due to the pandemic making the total value of the economy lower. The flows between stocks cause almost everything to go down at least a little instead of some companies staying completely unscathed. But stocks in the most impacted sectors still went down a lot more.

PFOF is a thing but that only impacts things on small scales. It's not going to make a difference to a move like March 2020. Stop loss raids I also believe to exist and that can have a somewhat bigger effect but again, not going to cause a prolonged market crash.

Not seeing how selling short stock would impact stock prices differently from selling long stock. Nobody outside the brokerage handling the trade, including the buyer, would even know if it was short or long stock they were buying. It also has the same economic consequences for the seller.

If they engineer a crash by selling stock short to make the stock go down, they have paper profits that they cannot realize without buying all the stock back, which would cause the stock to go up, destroying the paper profits and probably generating an actual loss.

Lopen posted...

Not subtly but yes.

Did retail even sell a lot in March 2020? I don't know anyone who was selling stocks then. Or at least who said they were.

But to the extent that this even works, it can run both ways. Retail can be manipulated into buying just as much as it can be manipulated into selling. Was the 2000 bubble caused by hedge funds hyping internet companies to retail so they could unload their shares on retail at crazy valuations? Was the meme stock surge last year caused by long hedge funds manipulating retail into crushing the short funds?

Point is not that no selling is legitimate.

Point is that the news causing mass sell offs is fake. Mass sell offs are what cause mass sell offs. The news is just the cover.

No one gives a damn about an inflation report. What people give a damn about is the value of their stocks going down. Being able to attribute it to a news event is a psychological ploy, not actual cause and effect.

The difference is subtle, and all in the chain of events.

One is bad news -> fake price action with news as the perceived reason -> people panic sell

Other is bad news -> legitimate price action based on news -> people panic sell

My point is not so much that the Covid dip wasn't at all legitimate as much as market makers and hedge funds saw how lucrative it all was and are trying to exploit that by making literally any bad news cause huge dumps even when it isn't logical.

Why pfof is so insidious is because while dumps can't be controlled by PFOF, slowly covering short positions after the fact absolutely can be, so you have this loophole in how orders resolve that is able to be exploited by people who want the price low to suffocate a stock.

I feel like this back and forth is micro v macro.

And inflation matters insofar as the only fundamental left that means anything is the Fed rate. We'll get the asset crash when lending chokes on itself; big money wants to front-run that event, naturally.

Right

I guess my point is a lot of macro issues have caused micro price action lately.

The problem is if it's a macro issue, it's largely already priced in. Like yes inflation could be a problem long term, but it's not going to make people dump their stocks during a fed talk.

So ultimately it's fake price movement, even if the overall trend isn't necessarily.

Side note I still like BBIG to gamma this week.

Price and volume action seems similar to what it was back last September when it ran from $2.70 to $6 in one day. To a lesser extent the January run as well, but I suspect January was a trap/pump and dump at this point to get people more scared about this chain, which actually will be run.

Regardless, the volume always seems to dry up before the run, and today we were at 13m, which is a long time low by a good margin. Yesterday was 16m. We've generally been getting mid 20s.

What's more, this is a more juiced option chain-- granted, the float is larger too, so it kinda offsets. However, because of the float being larger, warrants can't really suffocate it, they've basically been exercised.

I'm hoping it starts running tomorrow, but feel reasonably confident it'll at least clear $5 even if it doesn't run till Thursday. Earnings call needs to be announced Wednesday or Thursday or they get fined-- the earnings call itself doesn't matter, we know what they're going to say. Balance sheet is bad because they've been buying shit. However "good guidance" could be excuse to run the price. Tyde could also be addressed during the call, or announced at any time really, which is another excuse to run the price.

I really have this feeling they want the 10c ITM by Thursday. Way too much open interest there. Hopefully we get an ER on Thursday pre-market announcement today or tomorrow. That would have everything click into place.

If anyone is curious about my final positions on BBIG

I have expiring Thursday

19 20c
61 13c
100 10c
52 8c
9 7c
127 5c
147 4c
203 3.5c
15 3c

Total market value of about 15k ready to vaporize. I've basically already felt the pain of this vaporizing though because the values in my portfolio are super small at this point.

Now the funny thing is if the price gets even a bit over $4 I end green, but... you know, 15k, yeah, it would hurt. But what can you do. I have shares and July, October, January calls still in place, so still like my position even if I lose all of this. Would obviously rather not lose it but ride or die as they say.

Lopen posted...

Right

I guess my point is a lot of macro issues have caused micro price action lately.

The problem is if it's a macro issue, it's largely already priced in. Like yes inflation could be a problem long term, but it's not going to make people dump their stocks during a fed talk.

So ultimately it's fake price movement, even if the overall trend isn't necessarily.

Short term price movement always resembles a random walk. I think random is a better term than fake.

As for dumping stocks during a fed talk, while I agree the market generally reacts too much to this kind of thing, the market doesn't actually move very much. It moves 1%, maybe 2%, in response to this kind of thing. It's not that much when you consider that stocks are levered with respect to interest rates to the extent that the underlying companies use leverage (debt).

I also think you are overestimating the extent to which retail drives price movements. I don't think it's retail doing most of the stock dumping during a fed talk. Most people aren't watching those press conferences. It's probably mostly banks, mutual funds, hedge funds, etc. who are watching those press conferences because that's their job and even if the hemming and hawing from the Fed isn't particularly useful, it can't be worse than not watching right?

Actually that's entirely my point

It's hedge funds etc dumping the stocks to try and get retail investors to panic sell. Retail is not moving the stock.

How successful it is is questionable because it generally bounces right back but yeah. The fact that it bounces right back kinda drives home the point that it's artificial movement to spook people.

RIP 15k it looks like

I could see it surging inexplicably towards end of day but it's looking like not

Ride or die !!

Guess I'll buy the inevitable dip Monday after the earning news. I'm glad I'm 80% in shares and most of my options are 7/15

I still have a lot of options on the table and I'll make out like a bandit if it hits ATH by July or even October, but I'd be lying if I said this doesn't hurt a lot.

In particular the batch of $3.50 options I bought last month really stings.

However I am actually loading up July calls today if it doesn't moonshot. Earnings is tomorrow, there is a conference call Monday pre-market

If we get Tyde news Monday pre-market, it could run. The timing is key. Bullish news at the start of the week is common.

The things you have to realize with this play

Options are at a small premium and have huge open interest. This one got no sold but July and next Jan have massive chains
Tyde forces closure of short positions pretty much. There are ways around it but it's not easy.
Short interest is underreported-- market makers are using tricks with deep in the money puts to create synthetic shorts.
The price is being massively suppressed by dark pool right now. Basically brokers are giving people shares in their accounts but not actually buying them, so there's a huge imbalance of buys. Eventually they need to actually deliver those shares, which will cause a surge, that will compound with option interest needing to be hedged.

People like to romance about how GME was retail and blah blah. And I mean, it was, but the options were always what drove that play, not apes diamond handing shares. Diamond handing is what cuts the escape route. We still have apes diamond handing shares but the big thing is eventually the dark pool bill becomes due and then all the options that are being bought and sold at pennies are suddenly in the money.

The only escape plan was dilution before Tyde, but that vote has been moved out. So yeah I'm not worried. I just hate that I wasn't able to cash any out because my tax bill is rather large and I was hoping to get like 10k out here at least, not realize 15000 losses.

Also the really big thing is to distribute a dividend like that synthetic shorts by definition need to be closed-- there is no actual way around it as you need to find who has the shares to give them their dividend.

Seeing the stupidly high open interest on a lot of deep in the money put positions is your evidence there. As is reported short interest going down and the price not going up.

Tinfoil hat yeah, but there were things to learn from GME and AMC as far as how the price movement tends to go. That's why I'm excited to be in before the moonshot. Once the share price moves the option premium on literally every strike is going to from pennies to dollars in a hurry.

How do deep ITM puts create synthetic shorts?

And what drove GME was the outrageously high short interest. I don't think it really matters what the mechanics of the squeeze were; the bigger picture is that the market saw that short interest and realized it was a gold mine.

The market maker has to short sell shares to remain delta neutral when puts are purchased. Deep OTM calls can also be bought and then also used as collateral to short a stock you don't actually own, because your call covers the position. Anyway the gist is shorts "cover" then buy deep otm puts to force the market maker to short, reducing the reported short interest but not actually changing the short interest. Thing is, market maker doesn't actually need to locate shares to short. They can literally just create shares to short to provide "liquidity". The dark pool is also being heavily abused these days to really obfuscate what price buys and sells were made at, and how many of each. The dark pool volume for BBIG this week has been at 70%, which is ridiculous.

If you look at AMC and GME price action you would see these pop up in large amounts as short positions are "covered"

The reason GME was able to have short interest over 100% was entirely because of this. Deep ITM/OTM calls and puts let you do dumb stuff with the bookkeeping which in theory don't matter unless you call the bluff by putting the price over the price where they're doing that stuff. The mechanics absolutely matter because the mechanics drive the numbers. GME reported numbers going up so much were mostly because the price went to $30 which was over a lot of the full chains in place. They had to legitimately short to try and push the price below their synthetic short position-- when that was found to be impossible, all the synthetics had to be covered. The reported number ballooning isn't really that important, it's what caused the price action beforehand.

Like people like mentioning GME, but realize the reported short interest when AMC ran from 3 to 20, and 8 to 72, was quite low relative to Gamestop, and it was all the same kinda stuff-- people just got better at hiding the numbers in the bookkeeping (I suspect there was a gaffe somewhere in the GME process too). Like I don't know all the mechanics offhand as I kinda just filed it away as "look for this because it's suspicious", and really no one does know the exact mechanics that allow this, but it's kind of a where there's smoke there's fire kinda thing. There's no reason for instance you'd want to have like 5000 deep itm puts on BBIG with 1 week until expiry (slightly ITM would basically do the same thing as a legitimate position to profit if the stock goes down), but this has happened multiple times during the past six months. Overstock was probably doing the same kinda stuff when it ran from $3 to $120 but there were less people combing the data then to know.

Like if you want my thinking of how GME worked.

You look at the available option chains available late 2020, they probably all capped around 20-30. That's because the price hadn't been above 20 for years. So you've got this thing where the strikes of 20-30 are being used to keep shorting it into the earth while keeping reported short interest relatively low. Now the price moves to 30 in spite of that. To combat that you add options of 60, and use those as your base, repeat the process. When 60 failed but one week afterwards, then you're screwed-- if AMC had jumped to $145 after $70 you would have seen it reach super high numbers like GME did too. I think the key was AMC was a bit more aggressive with opening up those higher strikes than GME was, so it never reached the higher levels. AMC actually diluting helped too.

Anyway GME had no "forced closure of synthetic shares" play on the table. That's the difference. They had to manually jump through those option barriers-- BBIG doesn't need to do that. But your warning signs that it's occurring is when there's buzz among retail investors and the price relentlessly goes down and the short interest goes up and down repeatedly. That's what you saw in AMC. In GME you saw super high percentages because of imo a bookkeeping/reporting error, but the percentages literally don't matter once they're sufficiently high long enough.

Note how AMC has 37000 open interest on the 1/20/2023 call strike 145 and how GME has 18k 950c. That's a red flag-- that's not degenerate gamblers playing options (60c on AMC gives you hundreds of times over the profit at basically any price reached, so WSB gamblers would not target that) that's synthetic short share collateral. The reason the 2023 is so high vs others is because the other chains weren't available at the time when it was running.

You see this in a lot of stocks, not just high SI stocks, but the key is the sustained short interest over time and unusual options activity rather than the reported number, when it comes to detecting synthetics. If short interest goes up and down 10s of percents week to week and the price is barcoding or going down, then no one covered anything and likely the short position is increasing.

And this is the end of your episode of tinfoil hat with Lopen. Next episode hopefully I'll be pointing at a $30 stock price and telling you "see???"

GME could get short interest over 100% because all that short selling was creating synthetic long shares. The total short position cannot exceed the total number of long shares including synthetic ones.

The market maker can also hedge against writing puts with cash. It's not like calls, where no amount of cash will properly hedge. And really, they don't need to even take cash out. They're not subject to the margin rules that apply to regular people and they can just use their long positions as effective cash to hedge (since they could be sold).

You look at the available option chains available late 2020, they probably all capped around 20-30. That's because the price hadn't been above 20 for years. So you've got this thing where the strikes of 20-30 are being used to keep shorting it into the earth while keeping reported short interest relatively low. Now the price moves to 30 in spite of that. To combat that you add options of 60, and use those as your base, repeat the process. When 60 failed but one week afterwards, then you're screwed-- if AMC had jumped to $145 after $70 you would have seen it reach super high numbers like GME did too. I think the key was AMC was a bit more aggressive with opening up those higher strikes than GME was, so it never reached the higher levels. AMC actually diluting helped too.

I think you're missing the big picture here. The point is, why should the share price move up like that? Why wouldn't it stay at $20 forever and let market makers feast on options premiums? Because the market saw the short interest number and started thinking a squeeze was likely, rather than extremely unlikely. Without the GME surge the AMC surge probably never happens, and it wouldn't matter how crazy the option chains were. There would just be no expectation that the price would move.

Note how AMC has 37000 open interest on the 1/20/2023 call strike 145 and how GME has 18k 950c. That's a red flag-- that's not degenerate gamblers playing options (60c on AMC gives you hundreds of times over the profit at basically any price reached, so WSB gamblers would not target that) that's synthetic short share collateral. The reason the 2023 is so high vs others is because the other chains weren't available at the time when it was running.

That does not help a squeeze. If the 950c is hedging a short, then whoever holding it is neutral on GME (in the sense that the tail outcomes are ruled out, anyway) and is not going to get margin called no matter what the price is. It would be better for a squeeze if the 950 calls were held by WSB gamblers and the shorts were not hedging.

If you remember what happened with the broader market the day GME went over $300 the first time, that was what a margin call or preparations to avoid a margin call looks like. Hedge funds had to liquidate their long positions in other stocks to raise cash to cover their short positions. They were not sufficiently hedged with calls on their short stocks.