EDIT: This post is meant as a mathematical (\~Middle School Algebra) exercise regarding GME stock and shorts. The title itself is meant to be the literal end as intended, and describes how it would be impossible for all shorts (estimated) to be covered, closed and completely done and finished, with only using the available outstanding shares on the specific days stated. Please note that I have made no comments on possible options that HF's can/did use as I DO NOT HAVE THAT DATA! I have, hopefully, labelled the assumptions I made to do these calculations, and pointed out some general assumptions,more shorts mean more gains, sarcastically, that do not always appear to be true in the given data.
These are just general findings, so chill the fuck out!
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Please note that the below plots are all done using publicly available data from FINRA, Jan29th text file ( http://regsho.finra.org/CNMSshvol20210129.txt) Feb 5th text file (http://regsho.finra.org/CNMSshvol20210205.txt) regarding short volumes and Yahoo Finance for daily volume and GME daily prices.
I promise you the long read is worth it, but the TLDR version is at the bottom in Figure 9. The majority of the text is needed to inform a general audience of how an estimate of over 70 million shorts a day was reached. Please help out if there are any huge oversights, or wrong calculations, in the comments below, as I'm not responding to nearly any chats these days due to all the bots wanting me to either join an illegal conspiracy to raise the price of silver, or just shady as fuck.
Below is just a plot of the daily stock prices at the open and close of trading during regular hours for GME (source Yahoo Finance).
Figure 1: No real new information from this plot that everyone doesn't already know.
So as EVERYONE KNOWS, shorts can cause the price to rise in a given stock as the share of stock must be purchased, and with supply and demand, we aim for the heavens...
So let's do a quick sanity check. Looking at Figure 2, we see that on Jan 13th, over 40 MILLION shorts were executed! So if we check Figure 1on Jan 13th, we should expect to see that the price increased, which it did.
Let's look at it a different way and plot the Closing Price minus the Opening Price to see just how much GME stock price changed each day.
Figure 3: Overall change in stock price from open to close of GME.
This plot seems to be dominated by the wild changes in price during late January/early February, so let's do a normalization trick by taking the above values and dividing them by their respective opening price that day.
Figure 4: GME Price change relative to the opening price that day.
Now in Figure 4 we can see the change in price relative to what it was starting out on that day. Again we see that Jan 13th increased, by over 50% that day.
So let's make it easier for everyone and combine Figure 2 and Figure 5 to see both the total number of shorts executed, and the price change, for the same day.
[Figure 5: GME Price change relative to opening price, and the total number of shorts\(both short and \\"short exempts\\"\) during Regular Business Hours, via FINRA](https://preview.redd.it/udf0do41fyf61.png?width=600&format=png&auto=webp&