Melvin Capital: the adventures of an infinite size short sellerYet another degenerate bites the dust.
In the markets, there is a once every 100 years 5 sigma event every few months.
Some of you may remember the James Cordier of optionsellers dot com emotional apology video, after he got wiped out by a short squeeze on Natural Gas in 2018.
I looked into it back then and this guy was an out of the money naked option seller using extreme leverage.
These people, that get wiped out, every time they are psychopaths. This time we are looking at stocks, and the guy running Melvin Capital was a madman.
This guy single-handedly shorted between 50 and 100% of Gamestop all available shares. The ADV is ~3.5MM shares which is around 5% roughly.
I do not trade stocks (I do Forex CFDS & CME commodity futures) but I know enough to know shorting all by yourself more shares in percentage than the second highest shorted stock entire short interest, that's asking for trouble. I do not know what limits one should set, as a famous stock expert would say "it depends on your personal risk tolerance", but the adv would be a good place to start maybe? 5% of float seems big but reasonable?
When he shorted CD projekt he only used 0.6% of the outstanding shares according to this article.
Funny thing: they say he did not make as much as he should have because the rate was not favorable. They know this or they are guessing?
The reckless CEO of Melvin did not bother to open an FX position to hedge? He likes to live dangerously, or maybe he was making an FX bet.
www.world-today-news.com
On this page they claim to have a list of stocks Melvin is short of: whalewisdom.com
Reddit found a troll in a very dangerous position, and so they went whale hunting.
But I think it's other institutions that took down the whale actually, and the heroic "little guy" just joined late (as usual) and is now left holding the bag.
Melvin loss was entirely the responsibility of the head manager, risk managers and whoever came up with the idea of shorting more than 50% of shares.
It's always the same story. Before getting wiped out James Cordier published (on another site) a trading idea called "option selling opportunities so good they're scary" and was persuaded he could not lose.
I bet the same happened here. Gabe Plotkin had big success (50% returns, one of the best funds), got lucky and made easy money, got excited (this is the "don't get emotional" part), went in big, and then got punished.
I doubt Gabe Plotkin and James Cordier are excited today.
