January 29, Friday. Expiration Day.
The GME army is holding and continuing to buy GME.
I get an email from Robinhood in the morning stating there’s limitations on the number of shares each account is allowed to buy: 5. A measly 5 shares only. It’s almost worse than keeping the buys shut off completely – almost like a gesture, but a taunt. Other brokerages have completely unrestricted trading.
Rumor has it, Robinhood had to beg (reach out) to their venture capitalists for a billion dollar infusion – and it still wasn’t enough.
To me it makes sense that RH has the most problems of all the brokerages because they have the most retail traders. Especially ones that are on r/wallstreetbets.
The frustrating part is the CEO of RH has been doing a bunch of interviews as part of the PR damage control and he’s doing a terrible job. He dodges questions like Neo in the Matrix and keeps saying very vague statements no doubt scripted by his team of lawyers.
So back to today. Come 2pm, I get a message and email from Robinhood warning that options on GME will be forced closed 1.5-2 hours before market close (instead of the normal 1 hour ~3:00pm). At the same time, the stock of GME start dropping.
Making a smart move but frustrating to do it – I close my option spreads at only 60% profit even though I was 95% sure they’d all close OTM. But the option chain pricing is so crazy I couldn’t risk RH choosing the bid/ask for me.
Upon closing my options, I now have available capital so I use it to buy 5 GME stocks. Nope. The morning’s 5 stock allowance has been dropped to 1.
Sighing, I buy 1. Then I go on Webull and buy 9 more to hold the line. The war rages on. After recovering before the closing bell, the stock slips a little afterhours.
So far, institutional traders have lost $56 billion on GME shorts. But they’ve only reduced their short position of 130% down to 113%. The word is that they have until Tuesday morning to settle all their ITM calls they still owe.
Monday will be an interesting day.
It’s time to rest for the weekend.