So me and my Roommate three days ago just entered a weight loss bet. The details are for 3.5 months we are going to put twenty dollars aside every paycheck. The winner gets the pot. The loser will dress up as princess peach and well go go karting with all of our friends.
I weighed 217 (my nemesis 204) at the start of the bet, the weigh in 3 days ago. Today I'm at 214. I am 6ft (my nemesis 5.6ft) tall and generally walk 7 miles a week already. My plan of attack is to drink a gallon of water a day and keep calories to a limit of 1700.
My question is what exercises should I do at home? I get the opportunity to be a guest at a gym twice a week for about an hour. I have 25lb hand weights at home too! The kicker is I live in a second story apartment so even light running in place makes a lot of noise.
Any advice exercise wise or diet wise is greatly appreciated! I'll keep y'all posted too on the bet.

My mom was the sort of person to look like a wallflower until you got close and then spout out facts about her favourite animal. It was an emperor penguin. She said their journey for love and parenthood was the hardest and most connecting with her.
I’m told all the usual things about her; she had a smile that could light up a room, her laugh cut through the malaise of an awkward party, her stride was confident and her form was elegant. From the day I could understand what it was to be remembered, she was painted to me as a true goddess.
After all, aren’t all moms supposed to be that to their children growing up?
Mom died when I was 4. Aggressive cancer riddled her body with tumours, stole her stride, her smile, her laugh. Everything in just 18 short months.
I didn’t see her for much of it. But if I did, I obviously didn’t remember. I heard somewhere we don’t start forming memories until we’re around 2 years old and implicit memories - those unconscious memories that stick with us automatically - aren’t even until we’re 7.
So essentially my mother was already dead for 3 years before I could even unconsciously think of the word “Mom” and go to her face. A face that was stolen from me. A face that I’ll never see.
I’m giving you this background information now because it’s vital that you understand my mom before we get into the thick of it.
I can’t sit here and tell you I loved my mom unconditionally. I didn’t know her. Dad was never in the picture, so Grandparents were where I was shipped off to. Good people, kind people. They raised me on stories of my Mom and made sure to do the one thing she’d requested when her sickness finally got her:
”Show Nick the milestone tapes.”
For those unaware; a milestone tape is something where a loved one, usually a parent, records a loving video to congratulate their kin on a moment they’re missing out on. First day of school, marriage… you get the picture.
I remember being 5 years old, I’d not long tripped on the stairs after miscalculating my steps and smashed my front tooth on the top step, sending my first baby tooth flying. Thankfully, the pain was short-lived in my mind, I was mere days from my birthday and a surprise trip to Disneyland was coming up. In the middle of packing, I was sat down in front of the TV with my Grandpa Mihail and him putting in these pristine discs, a gaudy logo flashing up on the screen still burned into my retinas to this day:
“Gone, but not deleted: A video message from Leanora Stankowski.”
The image would flicker for just a moment, always just a moment each time, then she’d appear.
A young woman sat in a black leather armchair with a small table to her side and patterned wallpaper behind her. She was in her late 20s with her raven black hair tied in a messy bun, strands curled and dangling down her porcelain face, a beauty mark sitting just beneath her right eye, the pair of them shining like emeralds that caught the first ray of sunshine, black lipstick gave way to shimmering teeth and a smile that made even an oblivious little me feel… lost.
“Hi pumpkin, it’s mommy! I hope my little prince is watching the throne while i’m away… how can you be nearly six years old and already losing your baby teeth? You’re growing up too fast, little man!”
She puffed out her cheeks as she feigned a frown before giggling. My heart sank in my chest, I knew something wasn’t right even then. Her tone was playful, buoyant and full of joy, like she’d never missed a moment of my life.
“Make sure you put your tooth under your pillow tonight, Deda Mihail will make sure the tooth fairy comes and nothing else!” She raised a single finger with a wink, posing for a moment before her face fell, her posture sank and she fell back into the armchair a tad, growing smaller as she coughed. After a moment, she cleared her throat with a quiet dignity and made sure the hand she coughed into went out of shot as she fixated on the camera with a weak smile.
“Mommy loves you, my little crown prince. Close your eyes and breathe with me…”
I looked at my Grandfather and with tears streaming down his face and a bite on his lip; he put a hand on my shoulder and nodded. I did as I was told and took a long breath in, the air cold and filling my lungs, intoxicating me as I heard her words. The same words i’d come to hear at the end of every video she recorded:
“I’ll always be with you.”
-
And so it went. For every milestone I undertook, there was an accompanying video. When I graduated middle school, when I rode my first bike… even when I broke my first bone, she had a video ready.
I was around 11, when biking home from school, I collided with a speeding driver. The bastard didn’t even stop as my small body careened over his windscreen, rolled over the hood and smashed into the concrete, tearing my right arm to pieces.
Passers-by said it was a freak accident; that the car just appeared out of nowhere and then vanished. But hell, what do hit & run drivers do? Speed, speed, speed.
Medicated up to my eyes and sitting up in hospital, Grandpa handed me a mini-dvd player and the familiar face shot up. I could never tell you in those earlier videos if these were done back to back or months apart, but Mom still looked radiant… albeit with more coughing in each iteration.
“Hi pumpkin, it’s mommy! Though, i’m sure by now you’re probably cringing at the mere mention of me referring to myself that way… oh god, do people still say cringe? It’s hard to know what the world you’re in is like anymore, but moms are never supposed to be cool, are they?” She chuckled, a faraway look in her eye as the pit of my stomach expanded.
“No…” I thought, tears in my eyes, gripping the sheets with my good hand. “I WANT you to say those things. I WANT you to embarrass me…”
“Well, if you’re watching this, then you’ve broken your first bone… I hope it’s a bit later in life and not when you’re so upset you can’t even hear me. But sweetie, this is an important life lesson that I wanted to be there for; pain happens. It’s a part of our world, and everyone in it must experience it. Sometimes it’s physical, like now when your body hurts so much that you wanna yell and cry out. Sometimes it’s emotional, which you get when someone upsets you, hurts your feelings… something you might also feel from seeing my face right now, which I’m sorry for.” She trailed off, that weak smile plastered across her face like the greatest lie ever told. She took a breath, and I heard the quivers in her voice. Both from sadness and from sickness. “BUT, you are my little crown prince, and while you’re watching the throne, I know you’ll do great things and overcome ANYTHING that stands in your way. You know why?”
“Why…” I breathed, my body radiating with hot pain but my heart aching. I leaned in as she leaned in, like sharing a secret only we would ever know.
“Because you’re my son and my love for you will push you to do anything.” She whispered, my face involuntarily growing into a smile without even realising.
“Just don’t look at the wall behind me.”
My eyes were fixed on hers, a small sliver of the background visible behind her ear. As my eyes slowly broke from her gaze and travelled over, she spoke again.
“DON’T.” A frantic whisper escaped her lips. My eyes snapped back as a pale shade shifted out of sight.
Blinking once, I saw she was sitting back in the chair, talking as if nothing had happened. Had I dozed off? I was on high pain medication; it wasn’t impossible…
“I’m running out of time, these are only supposed to be short, so i’ll finish up here. “Mommy loves you, my little crown prince! Close your eyes and breathe with me…”
Again, I did as instructed and heard a distinct creaking sound from the speakers, undoubtedly her settling into her chair.
“I’ll always be with you.”
-
So the years went, fewer milestone videos popped up. Some of them were simply mundane or not that noteworthy. Not why we’re here. But the usual events; first day as a freshman, last day as a senior, prom night and even an embarrassing one wherein a 17-year-old me had the most uncomfortable 15 minutes of being explained dating etiquette and safe sex by my long-gone mother.
By the time I’d reached 21, only four tapes remained. Grandpa Mihail had passed and Grandma Suza was getting on, so they were given to me with the obvious instruction to not watch them until the time was right.
And this is the part where things take a turn.
A bad breakup, bad life choices, even worse friendship choices with substances readily available, a lifetime of insecurities stemming from no parental figures (all the love in the world to my grandparents, but it’s not the same) and a series of videos from your long-dead mom are enough to fuck anyone up.
So, I grabbed a bottle, some pills and put the next video in, planning to binge them before I took my leave. I mean, fuck it, what’s the harm if I’m ending it all, right?
The video flickered and cast a long shadow across my dismal apartment before the visage of my mom came into focus.
It’d been a couple of years since the last video and in my emotionally unstable, drunken state… I was not prepared for what I saw.
Emaciated, sunken eyes and a slack jaw, her tongue hanging out and drooping to the bottom of her chin, thick pungent saliva with her concave chest heaving under the weight of the oxygen machine wrapped around her face. A looming shadow with two bright blue orbs for eyes and jagged pillars for teeth, wrapping its arms around her.
It locked eyes with me and cocked its head to the side.
“NEW.” It croaked, my skin bubbling with fear and chilling my blood, I had never felt a terror like it.
It felt like it knew me and saw into me.
I recoiled and in my cocktail of fear and horror, retched up everything I’d downed not 10 minutes earlier. A torrid mixture of bile, acid, pills and booze spread over my carpet as tears ran down my face. My stomach ached and every cell in my body screamed at me in protest. The thoughts swirling in my thick skull were that of disappointment, disgust and repulsiveness. I felt weak, alone and broken as I collapsed onto the floor in the fetal position, sobbing.
“Sweetie, it’s Mom.”
Through blurred eyes and a haze of pain, I looked at the TV half expecting some emaciated creature to lurch through, but there was my mom. She looked tired, her hair now matted to her head and exhaustion racking her bones, but beauty radiating through her as she held her hands in her lap and leaned forward, smiling.
“If you’re watching this… then things are bad. I don’t know how bad, but I can guess. Grandpa wouldn’t have let you watch this if you’d gotten your heart broken or were at that age where emotions are as high as a kite and just as volatile… so I can assume that, much like me, you’re in a bad place…” She coughed and I felt the need to sit up and give her my full attention, this woman no more than 6 years my senior frozen in time still finding ways to command my attention with her every word.
It was like I was 5 again.
“Sweetie, I know I can’t talk to you like a child anymore, so I won’t. Honestly, I’d been so excited to see you grow up, go through that phase where we bicker and argue over small things before finally settling in the longest and most beautiful phase of our family dynamic…” I watched her lips quiver and eyes glaze over, my own mirroring as she shakily concluded “The one where we’re best friends who always look out for each other.”
That broke me. Every emotion I’d trained myself to hide away when kids started asking questions I couldn’t answer, situations I’d wanted my mom in, moments I felt alone… I let it out in one volatile evening of self healing, the words on that tape echoing in my head long after it stopped playing.
“The road ahead will be tough without me. It was always going to be. But, you’re the crown prince and you’ll eventually have that throne, survey your kingdom and know you can do ANYTHING and conquer ANYTHING… it’s getting closer now, but we still have some time left. So don’t let whatever is going on beat you, nor the thing after that. The Penguins didn’t, did they? I’m sure Grandpa told you, but they’re my favourite… those little birds share the burden of parenthood, walk over 100 miles and nearly starve to cultivate new life… I’d do all of that and more for you, honey. Because…”
She closed her eyes, and I did too, without prompting, we said it together;
“I’ll always be with you.”
-
It took time to get better. All things do. I would spend so many nights in withdrawal with the shakes, vomit, and staring up at a horrific beast looming over my bed. Like the thing on the tv but foggier, it’d imitate my movements and try to get closer. With every step, its eyes would glow just a bit brighter, everything else remaining shrouded in darkness, even if light passed through my curtains.
I don’t know how I made it through that time of my life.
One night, as it made its way to the foot of my bed, I closed my eyes and breathed on instinct, reciting my mother’s mantra. I suppose in moments of crisis; we turn to our most personal coping mechanisms and I wasn’t about to go back to the bottle. When I finished, it was gone.
Over the years, I completed my program, got clean and went through therapy to cope with the grief. When I hit 26, I met the 2nd most important woman in my life; Natalie. She knew what it was like to go through pain, to go through suffering alone. To play with the wrong demons.
We fell in love; we got engaged and eventually married. As she had been countless times before, mom was there to congratulate us.
Natalie had seen some tapes, but this was her first one that in its own way was directed to her. Mom was nearing the end by this point, her thin frame barely clinging to her always beautiful dresses and her skin beginning to stretch like paper. She took great gulps of air from the oxygen tank before talking, but somehow retained that exuberance she’d always had.
“I knew you’d find someone wonderful eventually, Nick. Penguins always find their mate for life and you’d be no exception!” She giggled through strained coughs, turning her head slightly as if she could see Natalie. “I don’t know you, but I bet you’re the most beautiful woman in the world if my crown prince chose you. Well, after me of course!” Another laugh, this time accompanied by tears from the two of us. “There’s just one more to go… So, look after each other. Love well and experience everything you can. And don’t forget…”
Natalie gripped my hand with her left, a hand on her bump with the right as we closed our eyes. I could hear the scratching sound more prominently now, but I kept my eyes shut, not wanting to ruin the moment.
“I’ll always be with you.”
-
We were so excited to have a baby. Natalie had come from a big family and was eager to start expanding our own. Even though I was reluctant, I couldn’t help but share in her enthusiasm when so many late nights were spent fawning over baby names, cute outfits and lofty plans for the future on how our kid would even behave around us. Determined to be “cool parents”.
But in between all of that, my mind would cast back to those tapes of my mom, the only parent I really knew. I wanted to use them as a guidebook for my own steps. She’d been such an integral part of life, it seemed… odd to not have her in it now.
Keeping the last tape separate, I re-watched the entire set one by one, reliving those moments I couldn’t truly appreciate until my own burgeoning journey into parenthood.
But when I got to the broken bone tape, I froze.
Once again, she leaned into the camera and whispered, eyes full of fright and panic.
“Don’t look.”
I pushed pause on the video and took a moment. Surely I was just highly medicated at the time, there couldn’t *really* be anything there, right?
So why was I so reluctant to move my eyes to the right to find out?
Taking a breath, I moved the video frame by frame and watched the corner where her face didn’t cover.
That shadow. That same fucking shadow. Looming in the background, eyes burning red with fury.
“DON’T LOOK. DON’T LOOK. DON’T LOOK. DON’T LOOK.”
I jumped, the video was skipping, stuck on the sounds of my mother’s panic stricken voice begging me not to stare, but I couldn’t help it. I stared and watched this creature take confident, unnatural and twitchy strides from the background, getting ever closer to the camera. I saw the muscles on its face twist and undulate as it pressed its cheeks up into a twisted grin, the sight of rot and earth and unspeakable things in its mouth all displaying themselves in full glory as it intonated one word that sent screams through my home before shutting off.
“SOON.”
-
Natalie was 8 months gone, petite and a history of prior drug abuse. They said her heart just couldn’t take it, her body gave out, and that it was a miracle our daughter survived.
I took it all in and yet none of it as I cradled my entire universe in my arms, the second greatest woman I’d ever known now taken from me too.
“Phoebe.” I breathed, unable to take my eyes off of her perfect little face as she slept soundly just 12ft from her dead mother. “Her name is Phoebe, and she is the crown princess.”
Somewhere in the corner of my eye, a shadow cast itself over Natalie’s bed, right as they put the sheet over her.
From that night on, there would always be noises outside our home. Always faint howling. Always a solitary spot in the front of the property where no light could touch it.
For a while, I forgot about the videos. Forgot about everything that wasn’t Phoebe. Raising her became priority #1 and I would work any extra hours I needed to, give up any friendship I had to and spite myself in whatever way was necessary to ensure that my perfect girl slept soundly at night.
It wasn’t until Phoebe’s 2nd birthday last week that I finally got the courage to dig out the videos and watch the last one.
How many times had I sat in a home, emotionally destroyed and at a crossroads in my life, waiting to see this woman’s face and hope she’d somehow have the magic words to guide me?
As the picture flickered on, the logo shining up on screen; I cast my head back with a mixture of surprise and sadness as I realised the significance of the year;
I was older than her now.
“Hi sweetie, I guess we’ve finally reached the end, huh?”
Her voice sounded… younger. I looked down and saw her standing up. No chair or wallpaper in sight. It looked like she was recording this in her bedroom, a picture of health, all things considered. Her eyes red from crying but her voice unwavering, like she’d prepared these words carefully.
“This is technically the final video for you, but the first for me. Weird how this all works, but this is how it needs to happen… if you’re watching this, you’ve got your own little princess to protect. The crown prince has now become the king, and I couldn’t be prouder!” She beamed, but my stomach tightened at those words.
“Your own little princess.”
I breathed, my chest tightening. How did she know?
“I imagine you’re now wondering how I know. Well, that’s not the important part. What’s important is if you saw what you think you saw. Within the videos, between the frames. There is something lurking here, Nick. Something ancient.”
I felt the house shudder, settling into place, no doubt. But I couldn’t separate myself from the fear running through my body.
“It feeds on misfortune. It watches from the shadows and waits for small, tiny windows to make itself known. I don’t know where it came from or what it is, but I know what it wants…”
A rumbling behind me, the sound of wood splintering and creaking. The unmistakable sound of tapping that i’d heard every time we did the mantra at the end of a video. I was shaking, but I didn’t stop watching.
“It wants us, Nick. We seem to be a… source for it. When it finishes using us, it moves on. A long time ago... I was told that if I captured it in film, solidified it in these repeatable tapes, it would slow it down… maybe even stop it. I have no idea if it’ll work, but you deserve to know now that you can almost certainly see it too. Because if it doesn’t stop here, if YOU start to see it… start to experience misfortune…”
My heart skipped. Tripping over the stairs and narrowly missing cracking my skull as a child, losing my first tooth. The hit and run that shattered my arm, my first broken bone. Marrying and losing Natalie, my first love…
Oh no.
Oh god, no.
I willed my body to move, to leap out of the seat and rush to Phoebe’s room, but I had to hear the rest through, screaming at my mom to tell me the solution.
“When your Deda Mihail told me about our curse… how he took me in after my Father died... about how it passes from father to daughter, mother to son, and so forth… You can try to avoid it, but it always finds a way…" She looked down in shame, clutching at her sleeves. "Truth be told; I didn’t want to get pregnant. But, things have a way of happening and I knew I couldn’t give you up.” She glanced behind her, something off camera scaring her into grabbing at her arms and rubbing them, shame and fear on her face. “I’m so sorry, baby. But I want you to know that there is power in these words. In these videos. I will do EVERYTHING I can to protect you, just like I know you’ll protect your child. No matter who it hurts in the process. Because…”
One last time. I just had to close my eyes one last time and it would all be over.
I did it on instinct. It didn’t matter that there was a slew of sounds alerting me to an invading presence in my home. That it was rapidly approaching me.
All that mattered was the mantra.
“I’ll be here for you, always.”
But what I heard parroting me back was not my mother.
A guttural, inhuman voice barked back the phrase and I swear I felt its breath inches from my face. I felt eyes unrestricted by pupils or sockets spin around, focusing on my weakest point. But I didn’t waver.
After a few agonising moments, it darted away and out of view, leaving only the static of the TV to keep me aware that I wasn’t in fact dreaming.
As soon as I knew it was safe, I ran to Phoebe’s room and checked on her, convinced that she was next in a long line of losses. Convinced that some otherworldly spectre had taken her from me.
Convinced I would be alone again.
You can imagine my relief when I opened the door to find her softly sleeping, clutching her teddy bear with his own attached blankie. The same toy my mom had given me.
I looked at her with the enormity of the situation overshadowing me. The realisation she was the same age I was when my mom got diagnosed.
The realisation that soon, I would be the one making a slew of videos for milestones I’d never get to see her inherit.
My crown princesses’ kingdom of nightmares.
And I don’t know if this is what my mother intended, but I took those words at the end to heart.
“Protect your child. No matter who it hurts in the process.”
-
I’m sorry, everyone.
I don’t know HOW this translates across mediums, but there is power in describing an old and malevolent force. Just like there is seeing it in the corner of your eye or when you experience a lucky break from death. A mis-step here and a wrong turn there. You’ll always see it.
My mother gave up everything to buy time, give me the chance to right the wrongs and find a better way, a way that involves my daughter growing up with her father in her life, without the plague of whatever this is hanging over either of us.
Maybe you won’t be the one, maybe it will simply look at you and find you not to its liking as it did me that fateful night, inches away from my flesh and determining that I simply wasn’t “ripe enough” yet.
But someone will come across this, and it will bite. It will bite and never let go. Be it nightmares, sleep paralysis, a slew of unfortunate mishaps or something flitting in the corner of your eye, it’ll be there. Whatever it is.
Waiting.
I wish you well, and I hope you don’t judge me too harshly.
But to me and to Phoebe, family is everything.
So close your eyes and take a deep breath.
Because they’ll always be with you.

Most traders think they know what is going to happen next. This causes them to put too much weight on the outcome of the current trade and forget to assess their performance as a probability game that they are playing over time (imagine focusing on your results after 100 trades instead of after just 1). Too much focus on the current trade puts extra weight on it like an exponential moving average instead of a simple moving average. Trading results are not an exponential moving average, all of your past trades matter — remember the 100 trades mentality.

“Be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful.”

There are two major emotions in trading: fear and greed. Warren Buffett is often quoted for “Be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful.” These forces constantly battle each other in the individual trader and the market as a whole as bulls fight against bears. Too much greed leads to euphoria and a lack of sensible judgment of what is going on in the market. Too much fear leads to dysphoria and a lack of control over trades and capital as depression often leads to harm-seeking behavior rather than mitigating the pain.
Fear of Losing
Effects:

• Makes trader hesitant when entering or exiting. Causes an inability to pull the trigger when needed.
• Can lead to bigger losses or missed profits.

Solutions:

• Create a trade plan before entering a trade, ensure it has edge, a high probability of winning, and a good reward:risk ratio — then pull the trigger based on these numbers rather than emotions.
• Let success mean sticking to your plan rather than making profits (you can always tweak your strategy later to lead to more profits, but you won’t get profits even on the best plan if you can’t stick to it).
• Know that losses are part of the game. The best traders have tons of losses. What separates them from the rest is their ability to manage a loss and continue without being affected.

Fear of Missing Out
Effects:

• Putting rules and trade plan aside just to get in a trade.
• Taking any price to get in a trend just to get in, even if the price is not a good value.
• Skeptics covert to fans of a trend to avoid missing out on profits or taking too big of losses betting against that trend.
• All of these cause blindness to the RISK of a trade (taking trades without knowing the risk is a guaranteed loss in the long run).

Solutions:

• Only trade when you have clear edge and clear reward:risk
• Stick to your tested strategies — just because a wave is perfect doesn’t mean you can surf it if you don’t know how to surf!

Fear of Letting a Profit Turn Into a Loss
Effects:

• Taking profits too soon and cutting your trade too short just to secure a win and not end up with a loss — great traders know the difference of opportunity cost between a losing trade and cutting a win off too soon
• Wanting to feel like a winner rather than be a winner. These traders feel like getting any green number out of a trade is a good outcome, when in reality they will never break even this way. You must make big wins and small losses to come out on top as a trader. Small wins won’t get you anywhere.

Solutions:

• If you are for or against a trend, stick with the trade until the trend confirms it changes (this ensure you squeeze the most out of the move and have quantifiable evidence to get out of the trade).
• Understand that the market will give many “false starts” and sideways moved, but once a real trend begins, it often goes much further than anyone expects. You only become a winner by riding this real trend all the way, not by getting chopped up by the false moves.
• Remember the 100 trade concept — the goal is to be profitable in 100 trades, not in 1 trade. A small win can be wiped out by a small loss (and you will always take small losses when trading). After 100 trades of this small movement up and down, you will end up breakeven or slightly down from bad fills and fees. The only way to be green after 100 trades is to make big wins because those won’t be canceled out by the small losses.

Fear of Not Being Right
Effects:

• Caring too much about being right about an analysis leads to a trader forgetting that trading is a probability game. Which again puts too much focus on the present trade instead of the 100 trades.
• Ego becomes inflated when you are “right” to a point of overconfidence which leads to taking on too much risk and feeling invulnerable — this can lead to huge losses as you are caught in a losing trade thinking that you are the trader who is always “right.” So you hold onto the trade to wait until it goes back to you being “right” again — but it ends up becoming a big loss or blowing your account.
• Form a bad habit of thinking right vs. wrong instead of good vs. bad. There is no being “right” in trading because there is never one right answer. There are infinite opportunities at any given moment in the market, so taking one opportunity isn’t wrong just because it doesn’t make a profit — it could have still been a good trade that just didn’t work out. On the other hand, if you take a bad trade and lose money, then you can learn from this and move forward without caring about being “right or wrong.”
• Prevents the trader from growth and learning because they only gather information for when they think they are “right” and ignore the information they get when they think they are “wrong” because they believe they already know why they were wrong.

Solution:

• Instead of “right or wrong,” try focusing on whether you trading “good or bad.” Good trading means sticking to your tested strategies, sticking to your plan, trading without emotion, and maintaining a balanced trade mentality.
• Let your ego go before trading. When you sit at your desk to trade, be aware of how your ego is trying to maintain your image of yourself. Let this go to give yourself room when trading to make mistakes and still maintain a balanced trading mentality to help limit losses and maximize profits.
• Stop being a perfectionist. The best traders in the world take losses consistently, but what sets them apart from the rest is their ability to manage these losses and continue trading without any effect.
• Set a goal to constantly improve instead of to always be “right.” Even if you make some bad trades, as long as you are learning from them and improving, you are going in the right direction.

The goal of managing fear is to balance it with an appropriate amount of greed in the form of confidence. Believe that if you trade well with a great strategy and always stick to your rules, you should come out profitable in the long-run. But also balance that confidence with knowing that the market doesn’t “owe” you anything and is simply an endless steam of information. It doesn’t care about you or what you think you “deserve.” Your job is to observe this stream of information and pluck trades out of it with a high probability of giving you enough profit to cover your inevitable losses.
​
Thank you for reading and supporting Inlight Trading and the growth of many consistently profitable traders!

This is a revised version of my previous article. I am going to try to update frequently as it appears people have more and more questions and misconceptions or misinformation is being spread quickly. This post is to educate not only the Dogecoin community but anyone who is interested in cryptocurrency/currency is general.
This information below is important. I ask that you please take the time to read this entire post before making judgment or commenting. My discord group of over 100 people have grouped together the majority of the most asked questioned and misunderstandings regarding Dogecoin, into the following 20 key points. Even if you know the answers to some of these please read the entire post. (Especially if you’re from the cryptocurrency community) Please read them below.

1. Question: What is Dogecoin?

Answer: Dogecoin (/ˈdoʊdʒkɔɪn/ DOHJ-koyn, code: DOGE, symbol: Ð) is a cryptocurrency invented by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, who decided to create a payment system that is instant, fun, and free from traditional banking fees. Dogecoin features the face of the Shiba Inu dog from the popular "Doge" meme as its logo and namesake. It was introduced on December 6, 2013, and quickly developed its own online community reaching a market capitalization of US $5,382,875,000 on January 28, 2021. [Wikipedia, 20210203]

1. Question: Why Dogecoin?

Answer: For the Lolz. Well, not quite. Initially as a purely meme-driven alternative to the likes of Bitcoin and Litecoin, Dogecoin in-fact boasts very low transaction fees and fast transaction times, very little network congestion, and most importantly, is designed to be used as a daily means of exchange, like your morning cup of coffee. Also, it is really fun, and who doesn't like the Dog ?!
1/2 - second perspective) Question: What Is Dogecoin? And why Dogecoin?
Answer: Back a few years ago, some crazy people banded together in support of a cryptocurrency known as Dogecoin. Similar to other cryptocurrencies, Dogecoin, the people's crypto, finds itself with the support of hundreds if not thousands of individuals pushing for this currency to succeed. But what is that? Unless you have been absent from every social bubble, you may have heard of Bitcoin. For the purpose of this explanation, you will find that Bitcoin is not exactly an easy thing to equate to Dogecoin, but lets think about the criteria of a Cryptocurrency.Bitcoin did not find its foothold overnight. In fact, it took several years. A lot of people fought tooth and nail for their belief in the coin. Crypto, in a nutshell, is a decentralized form of currency that finds its value in a combination of individual asset involvement, ease or difficulty in security of an exchange, creating a method of reliable, secure, trustworthy exchange, and other reasons.
Think of it like this: to exchange goods and services without currency, one must barter. I can barter a service (a haircut, for example) towards someone who needs a haircut, and in exchange they can barter a good or service to me.Currency then becomes an "IOU" (I Owe yoU) so that, if somebody needs me to cut their hair, they can give me an IOU for a good or service they control. When enough people begin adopting this, a centralized currency eventually takes hold. Crypto seeks to take this a step further and, insteal of relying on building up a centalization in terms of valuable metals or debt, it is built up solely on the exchange of goods and services. Dogecoin, compared to other cryptocurrencies, finds itself in a strange position where the origins did NOT see it soaring to the moon in any situation. Funny how things can change in time. Dogecoin has pros and cons to it. Comparing it to other cryptos, it does not face a supply cap like Bitcoin does. It is not a directly equated asset, such as how Bitcoin can be attributed as a digital gold asset. Mining dogecoin is also much simpler (comparitively) and does not face difficulty spikes, a source of Bitcoin slow-down. In essence, in 50 years, Dogecoin will still be around, still be mined, still be traded. Bitcoin will cease to be created, hoarded, and become the digital currency of the affluent.

1. Question: Places to buy dogecoin places where you can spend Dogecoin?

Answer: Refer to dogecoin posts by the moderators or a simple Google search for a list of businesses that accept doge as payment.

1. Question: Cryptocurrencies vs stocks. The main differences between them.

Answer: A stock is a type of investment that represents an ownership share in a company. Investors buy stocks that they think will go up in value over time. ... A stock is an investment. When you purchase a company's stock, you're purchasing a small piece of that company, called a share.
A cryptocurrency: When comparing crypto to stocks, the main thing to keep in mind is that cryptocurrencies have few if any regulations applied to them. It is still the "wild west" of trading. You can be scammed, skimmed, pumped-dumped, as so forth, much more often and more easily than with stocks. Terminology is similar to exact between the two, but both require a certain mindset. Crypto is almost always a long-haul game, where stocks can be short play or long haul.

1. Question: Dogecoin vs Bitcoin - their competitive advantages and disadvantages. Many cryptocurrencies have a higher degree of scarcity in comparison with FIAT (e.g. the US Dollar). For example Bitcoin / BTC has a strictly limited supply. And even though Dogecoin is not strictly limited, it is still a lot more scare in terms of supply than the US dollar. This simply means that if more people want to hold BTC or Doge versus the limited supply of the respective coin, the value of the cryptocurrency increases.
   
2. Question: Is Dogecoin a meme or should it be taken seriously?
   

Answer: We have all witnessed the power of a meme, the depths it can reach in society, especially in recent years. We have seen it many times before with video games, consoles, Oreos, or as of late even toilet paper... A meme has inherent value in the form of “widespread information”. A meme can spread an idea across diverse communities, and even entire countries literally overnight. This can bring about lasting effects on culture and society. If correctly taken advantage of, Doge can become the dominant meme currency of the internet, and amass real-world value just by being a popular, recognisable meme itself. This is where the saying “Dogecoin is the people’s coin” comes from.

1. Question m: Mining Dogecoin and the history of Dogecoin). How a new currency entered the market.

Answer: mining is the process of creating new cryptocurrency by solving a computational puzzle. mining is necessary to maintain the ledger of transactions upon which cryptocurrency is based. Miners have become very sophisticated over the last several years using complex machinery to speed up mining operations. Approximately 600,000 dogecoins are produced per hour and 5,256,000,000 per year,

1. Question: Circulation of currencies. The importance of buying, selling, and holding - and the differences between them.

Answer: To briefly explain this, a lot of people have been saying “buy and hold” or “I’m never selling!” - which in itself is great start. But there remains a lot of misinformation around the topic, for example that simply "buying and holding Doge" will drive up the price indefinitely. Unfortunately, that is just not true. Buying, holding, and selling are all intricately connected with each other. ALL of those three states are essential for a (digital) currency to flourish. Holding does neither hurt or raise the value of the asset, but rather it helps to establish a baseline, which is also called "setting a floor". Those who have diligently kept on holding their coins, have allowed Dogecoin to stabilize at roughly 0.03 USD cents for the past few days. Remember, this remains a huge gain from where Dogecoin has been just weeks ago. The reason the price is not changing much from this baseline right now is because few are buying and few are selling their Dogecoin, specifically due to topics which will be covered in other sections here. However, an active circulation of a currency is critical to establishing it as an effective means of exchanging goods and setting it up for long term growth. The best way to increase the overall value of the currency in the long run is by eventually by exchanging your coins for goods, services, or just by tipping and trading with other Dogecoin holders. The value of any means of exchange is fundamentally driven by supply and demand. If two parties agree that X amount of asset A is roughly worth the same as Y amount of asset B, you effectively have established a market.

1. Question: Establishing a floor or a baseline.

Answer: Due to other current issues, such as "RH" and other platforms artificially delaying FIAT-to-Crypto exchanges, these trends may appear strange at first sight, but those who continue holding onto their Doge are affecting or rather creating the floor. The floor is essentially the lowest value Dogecoin will drop to at current market conditions. The floor is currently around .06 USD cents. Which is up from 0.008 USD cents just a few months ago.

1. Question: Inflation and deflation Infinite supply / no cap vs cap in regarding to cryptocurrency

Answer: Inflation and deflation are common economic terms used to explain the change in the inherent value of a currency. This means that that 1 US Dollar today does not have the same value or “worth” as it did, for example, in 1950. Inflation is a situation of rising prices in the economy. A more exact definition of inflation is a sustained increase in the general price level in an economy. Deflation on the other hand occurs when the inflation rate falls below 0%, that is a negative inflation rate. While inflation reduces the value of a currency over time, a sudden deflation of a currency increases its relative value. This would allow more goods and services to be bought than before with the same amount of currency. Deflation can be a factor in leading to a recession and also result in a deflationary spiral.
10a) What does all this mean with regards to cryptocurrency, specifically Bitcoin versus Dogecoin?

 Well - Bitcoin is stagnant or deflationary over time, while Dogecoin is inflationary overtime. This is due to the way they are architected and mined, and how new coins are added into their respective markets - covered in other section. What gets misunderstood is which one is “better” or rather "the lesser evil". Since Dogecoin has an “infinite supply”, how can it maintain value? 

10b) You may have read things like: "You're stupid if you buy Dogecoin. It has no value. It has unlimited supply. It's just a stupid meme." Let's look at the US dollar (or essentially any major FIAT currency of your choice). FIAT currency is created out of thin air. It is backed by large sums of debt, and in the normal course of the economy it is inflating endlessly. But FIAT currency does have value. It's a value assigned to it by governments and people, a commonly accepted means for exchange. Again, FIAT does not have a limited supply. In fact, the supply of the US dollar is a lot more inflationary than Doge would ever be. Please think about that for a moment and make up your own mind.
10c) Yes, Dogecoin has a supply growth of about 5 billion coins (that's about 4-5% right now) per year, but why is that a problem, practically speaking? The growth is there to keep transaction fees to a minimum and allow a small, but healthy inflationary tendency, rather than the opposite.
10d) Dogecoin doesn't need a supply limit like Bitcoin, because in the long run it will be much easier to exchange Dogecoin for goods and services, than with other crypto currencies or regular currencies for that matter.

 If Bitcoin wants to become a real global currency with buying power, not just a speculation tool to exchange it for a few thousand debt based USD, when it hits a new record high every few months or years, its supply will have to grow inevitably. We have to see the bigger picture! Dogecoin may well climb to one US dollar, but why stop and sell there? Instead, we could build a new, fair, balanced monetary ecosystem based on Dogecoin, not to make a quick profit, but to change the whole world. Our current money is backed by signatures on debt contracts, not on real values. But it works, because we believe in it, even if it will be our downfall if it continues like this. Dogecoin is different. Dogecoin has a set amount of coins entering the market by the minute. There are plenty of spreadsheets out there showcasing exactly how much many Dogecoin will be in circulation at any given moment of time. People get confused because they think inflation is a bad thing, when in fact it is actually beneficial in small quantities and beneficial to the longevity of a currency. Dogecoin doesn't need a supply limit like Bitcoin, because in the long run it will be much easier to exchange Dogecoin for goods and services, than with other crypto currencies or regular currencies for that matter. If Bitcoin wants to become a real global currency with buying power, not just a speculation tool to exchange it for a few thousand debt based USD when it hits a new record high every few months or years, it's supply will have to grow inevitably. 

1. Question: Financial aspects of Dogecoin. Who will profit from it? What will happen if Dogecoin has exponential growth? A zero- sum game. Explaining that you only realize a loss or profit at then time of sell.

Answer: To clear things up - cryptocurrency is essentially what economist call a Zero Sum Game. A zero-sum game is a mathematical representation of a situation in which each participant's gain or loss of utility is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the utility of the other participants. What this means is that across a group of people who engage in selling and buying Dogecoin, if one person gains another person loses. For example if you bought at 0.08 and sold at 0.03 someone made a profit of 0.05 cents per Dogecoin while you lost 0.05 cents per Dogecoin. The important thing to understand is that in these situations the only way you truly lose or gain anything is when you sell. You don’t realize your gains or losses until you complete that transaction. What this means is that if Dogecoin does increase exponentially the people who have been holding since the price has been low will gain astronomical returns on their investment, while others who joined late will not.

1. Question: Stability vs Volatility

Answer: This describes basically how stable something is over a set period of time. Volatility is how much prices change over time. Stabilization of Dogecoin is important for the overall health, however, cryptocurrencies are known to and will likely remain very volatile for the foreseeable future.
13a) Pump and dump vs long term growth. "Pump and dump" is a form of securities fraud that involves artificially inflating the price of an owned stock through false and misleading positive statements, in order to sell the cheaply purchased stock at a higher price. Pump and dumps are consider illegal. While a subset of people are trying to pump and dump Dogecoin the legitimate community is focused its long term growth and stability which is achieved through the rest of the topics addressed here
13b - second perspective) Essentially many people are just coming onto DOGE because it has low barrier to entry, and enticed by the idea of coming in low, selling what they have and running with the profits short term. This has lead to pumps and dips, and a lot of misinformation being thrown around. I should clarify some points for those who are coming in, instead of repeating the HODL and diamond hands rhetoric. Planned pumps are not what Doge needs. Pumps of this nature usually have an attached implication, which is that people will plan on selling, capitalising on the hype and then buying low to wait for the next pump. This leads to money being taken out of the coin, resulting in the lower price we now see. This means that planned pumps are essentially feeding sellers. We are not doing this in secret. This is a public forum and people with the intention have the information needed to drain us dry if we let them. Essentially, if we want Doge to grow, planned pumps need to stop being openly advertised, or they need to die altogether. Of the two, the latter is the easiest, and it is what this post will be focusing on. Sustainable Growth is now the way. Pumps are fine when they're unpredicted - Elon Musk is living proof of that. However, planned pumps will result in our good boy coin shooting down to the dips, where sellers can reinvest and wait to harvest our money again at the next pump. If however, we grow the price slowly, the floor will increase in a much more stable fashion, resulting in smaller dips. This will mean that the insane dips where sellers truly farm their coin at become very inhospitable to them, as they'd need to put more and more money to receive less and less profit. Essentially, by slowly growing the coin with organic 'food' instead of steroids, we can slowly choke out those parasites who are ruining the growth of the coin by making every dip a horrible investment for their time and efforts. Sure, buy at the dips. Sure, hold the coin. But don't plan any more pumps. The less room you give to the sellers, the doubters and the paper hands, the more coin you can collect and the more profit that awaits you in the future. Conclusion If we come together as a community, Doge will truly live up to the hype - the people's currency. If we choose to continue listening to planned pumps, we have a very difficult, long and risky road ahead of us. Sustainable growth will beat large planned spikes any day.

1. Question: Difference between cold storage, internet wallets and Robinhood

Answer: Coldstorage - in the cryptocurrency world cold storage refers to physical objects/devices that contain your cryptocurrency.
Wallets are an electronic program of service that stores your cryptocurrency
Robhinhood- as of right now robinhood does not actually give you cryptocurrency when purchased through them. From Robhinhood’s cryptocurrency page: “We don’t currently provide you with access to your wallet or your wallet address. You own the cryptocurrency assets in your account, and you can buy or sell them at any time. We’re evaluating features to allow you to safely transfer coins to and from Robinhood, and we’ll update you when these features are available.” Robhinhood will be addressed in another section.

1. Question: Elon Musk - Is he important for Dogecoin? The impact of celebrities and big business supporting Dogecoin Celebrity/Influencer Involvement

Answer: Elon Musk, Mark Cuban As many may know, Elon is highly involved when it comes to “meme culture.” we can see Elon has tweeted several times concerning “doge,” reposting memes found from Reddit, as well as concerning himself with the ripples of the recent stock news. Mark Cuban, another notable wealthy, down-to-earth, community-involved individual, has recently mentioned “#dogecoin” specifically. Regardless of whether these people have positive intentions towards $DOGE or not, their mention carries weight and public opinion and is a good assumption that new eyes are looking at us as a result. It should be noted that they have tweeted neutrally to positively towards $DOGE, not indicating a full-send support but they clearly are not talking down the possibilities.
Big business allowing Dogecoin to be supported as means of exchanging goods, and people like Elon musk supporting and backing this cryptocurrency are important to proving its value and legitimacy.

1. Question: Is getting Dogecoin to increase to the equivalent of one US dollar possible? Can and will it really happen? What will change if it does happen? How high can Dogecoin realistically rise in price. Market cap explanation and comparison to US currency and global FIAT currency.

Answer: Yes, despite not having a fixed or capped supply, the value of the currency can rise based on its relative value against other currencies in the market. You can find examples of this in the FOREX market where currency pairs are traded, like Euro against US dollar, or US Dollar against Japanese Yen. As the value of Dogecoin rises, more and more businesses will recognise its potential and importance, and subsequently begin to accept it in exchange for goods and services. This will also help to grow the developer community around Dogecoin.
Market cap = price x supply. Price is determined by supply and demand (buying snd selling of Dogecoin. Supply is determined by mining Dogecoin.
The current market cap of Dogecoin while writing this article is 9,000,000,000 (9 billion) if Dogecoin was to reach $1 it would have a market cap of 128 billion dollars. Bitcoin (the most successful cryptocurrency$ currently has a market cap of approximately 700,000,000 (700 billion dollars). This means that at $1 the total supply of Dogecoin would be “worth” about 1/7th of Bitcoins total supply. The estimated supply of the US dollar is 2,000,000,000 (2 trillion) since 1 dollar = 1 dollar (LOLZ) the market cap of the US currency is 2 trillion. If Dogecoin were to reach this market cap - the price can be calculated through dividing the market cap (2 trillion) by the supply (128 billion). This means that dogecoin would equal the entire US currency at $15.60. This is definitely not impossible but highly highly improbable to ever reach this value any time soon. As in like 3-10 years away minimum. Now the entire supply of the entire worlds fiat currency is 37 trillion dollars. You can apply the same logic from above and see that the value would be $288.6. This is the theoretical limit to how much Dogecoin can be worth due simply to the fact that if it was valued at anymore than that amount it would be “worth” more than the entire world’s currencies combined which is not possible without adding more supply.

1. Question: Is Dogecoin a product of the Wallstreet Bets movement? What differentiates dogecoin from GME/AMC?

Answer:!Just like some other investment opportunities (Nokia, Blackberry), DOGE was brought into the spotlight amidst the whole GME situation during the previous week. Unlike those stock, however, Doge is not another short squeeze, it is not a stock. It is a cryptocurrency / asset that many people think has potential, despite its Meme origins. Many who feel that they were late for embarking on the GME hype or the Bitcoin train in 2013 respectively, are now looking towards Doge, one of the early alternatives to the original cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. Doge got a lot of interest recently, for example with the Elon Musk tweeting the same week.

1. Question: The situation with Robinhood - Changes in terms and conditions. Disclaimer, it is important to read through Robhinhoods entire terms and conditions to fully under what happened. The information below is just a summary and is not Robhinhoods terms and conditions but an explanation of what happened and why it happened

Answer: Robhinhood has received high profile backlash in the media recently for their involvement with GME/Wallstreetbets. A lot of the cryptocurrency and Dogecoin community were outraged when they found out that about one week ago Robhinhood stopped allowed instant transfers for their cryptocurrency. Unfortunately, while we may not agree with what happened there they do have a reason for this. Over the past week the sheer amount of people trying to buy cryptocurrency skyrocketed at one instant. When robinhood allowed for instant transfers what they were really doing is essentially “loaning” you money to make trades or purchase cryptocurrency before the funds actually hit Robhinhoods business account. This caused a huge liquidity issue and Robhinhood could not meet the demand. That is why you had to wait 5 business days for your funds to be approved. This is standard practice across multiple brokerage firms before Robhinhood pioneered the instant transfer option. Whether we like it or not, Robhinhood is a power house in their industry and not going away. Robhinhood is one of the most mainstream ways to purchase and sell cryptocurrency and if everyone pulled their money out of Robhinhood the entire cryptocurrency market would collapse which I believe we can all agree no one wants to happen.

1. Question: if all of the above information is true why the cryptocurrency full of people who are trying to discredit Dogecoin as legitimate cryptocurrency.

Answer: The cryptocurrency is horribly misinformed. They may have a solid understand of the technology aspect of cryptocurrency but the reason why Dogecoin will be successful is based on economics, mathematics, social theory and statistics as WELL as the underlying technology. cryptocurrency is full of gatekeepers who horde their knowledge while the Dogecoin community is focused on explaining and educating new people. cryptocurrency is notorious for being extremely serious and feel threatened that something that started at as a joke/meme has the potential to be better at cryptocurrencies intended purpose - exchanging goods and services - than Bitcoin or any other popular cryptocurrency which is deflationary in nature.
Thank you for reading this post in its entirety. It took a large amount of collective effort of people in my discord. I appreciate them to no end. We have over 100 people in that discord and we are here to stay. We are interested in explaining Dogecoin, reducing the scare factor and backing up Dogecoin through economic, social, financial, mathematical theory, etc. Per Dogecoin rules I cannot give out this discord, but if you are interested message me. It goes into greater detail on every one of these topics, with resources, links, articles etc. thank you and above all else remember that at the end of the day this is a meme cryptocurrency from 2013. But the people have spoken, and this is now official the people’s currency as well. Dogecoin🚀🪐🚀

Because I've dealt with distorted/loss of smell since 2016 after losing my sense of smell with a common cold. To this day I still lose my smell or it becomes so distorted I feel like I'm breathing dust. Only spraying saline in my nose and laying on my back for a while brings it back. Sometimes it comes back overnight too. Sometimes none of those work.
I was so.. surprised people finally seemed to shed light on something that's bothered me for half a decade now and I thought maybe people would develop a treatment or look into how to fix it! Now I see memes and shit and realized it's just another covid joke. It annoys me a little because I bet all those people making tiktoks about their 'lost senses' actually dealt wtih a little dulled sense then recovered their whole range while I don't think I ever will- now not only is it a joke, I must have Covid too.
For example it was almost impossible to eat for years due to the distortion before I figured out 'my own trick' which is just laying down or spraying saline in my nose- doctors just called me anorexic and essentially crazy, saying it was psychological or an act so I could lose weight (I was a young woman at the time and had become underweight so...🙄). It still angers me when I just finish cooking only to lose my sense of smell. Or am going for a nice walk only for my sense to become so distorted I can't breathe or think so I just walk back.
But who cares unless it's covid I guess?
I wonder if anyone else has "long term effects" from other viruses that were just ridiculed and ignored by the healthcare system before this? I don't know why I'm saying this here but everyone else seems covid crazy and can't imagine a cold would do this too.
Edit: Holy shit I figured it out. Dysosmia. It can be caused by viral damage because (all viruses have the potential to cause damage) to the olfactory nerves. Can be treated by putting your head upside down and dropping saline in your nose. Weird how I figured that out. (And seizure medication to stop the damaged nerves misfiring)

Alright folks, buckle up and Charge your batteries. This play's going to smack you all the way back to 1999.
First, a recap. WSB has proven to the world that retail matters. With the power of the hive mind, leveraged options trading, and distinctly fragile market conditions, we've refueled a few businesses that were written off by the street. And we made some money doing it. To no one's surprise, the gaslighting boomers called us manic, irrational, and stupid. They hired CNBC to dismiss us, politicize us, patronize us, or accuse us of cheating. They told us to go back to watching Netflix and let the big boys steer the ship.
Fact is, we all know the GME play was no smooth brained fluke. The strategy formed organically, built on a masterly combination of market technicals, narrative, underlying facts, and community research. A few timely events, and we took off to the stratosphere.
Now it's time to let them know that we can also bring things back down to earth. It's time to prove that us lovely commoners are grounded, sophisticated analysts--or at least, we're fast learning newbs. We are measured in judgement, clear in action, helpful to our communities. And we're having some fun. Retail is not a stupid mob, we are a collective social intelligence.
So there's my heartfelt intro, now onto the play.
Two words, and you're not going to like it:Short. Tesla.
I'll give you a minute.
If you just bought $TSLA and think all stonks only go up, you can skip to the comments, turn caps lock ON, and go nuts. Stonks to infinity means hyperinflation. You're a millionaire, and a burger costs 12k. No thanks. So here's the breakdown.
Table of Contents. (That's right.)

1. The Gravity. Hive Mind is Uploaded: Retail Options Control the Delta Hedge.
2. The Mass. All Roads lead to Mars...and Back. Passive Inclusion of $TSLA, the "God Meme".
3. The Playing Field.
4. The Trade.
5. The Risks.
6. The Endgame. Power to the Players.

Let's goo.

I. The Gravity. The Hive Mind is Uploaded. Retail Options Control the Delta Hedge.

Let's start with what we know. We're all poor and the Hedge Fund managers are rich. If you add together all retail investors, our funds would barely tick on the balance sheet of your local BlackRock. There's a reason they're called the 1%.
So what gives? How can a few Reddit analysts and their YOLO followers trigger cascading rallies across multiple tickers, even moving the very SPY itself?
​
GME vs SPY, during the Deep Fuckin Squeeze
To grasp the answer, you need to understand one thing about Delta-Hedging. Delta Hedging is what Market Makers do to stay 'risk neutral' while buying or selling options.
It works like this: When a Market Maker sells you a Call option, they also buy more Shares as hedge. That way, if the call ends up being right, they already have the Shares to sell you, and they've made a little profit on the price increase. If they didn't do the Delta Hedge, the Market Maker would have to go out and buy those shares above the Strike Price, then sell them to you at a loss.
There's more to it, but thats all you need to know here.
We saw these dynamics at play with GME. You probably heard the terms Delta Squeeze, Gamma Squeeze, Short Squeeze, etc.
As you recall, the squeeze happened because lots of people started going long GME. The more people went long, the more shares Mr. Market Maker had to buy, which sent the price higher and higher, tempting more and more people to buy in and go long. It's a feedback loop, sparked by a few retail traders at the bottom of the food chain.
As Alex Harfouche, former head of Goldman Sachs' European block trading, keenly points out:

"Basic maths can demonstrate that the massive price moves are not ONLY a function of Reddit retail crowd YOLOing calls turning MMs into delta-hedging chasers. 15% to 20% of daily traded calls become OI (they are day traded) hence have no effect on dynamic delta-hedging. This leaves one explanation to the parabolic moves: when Reddit starts concentrating call buying volumes on some names, some keen observers are using this as a signal and fueling the moves." https://twitter.com/alexharfouche1/status/1355177706292465664

The $TSLA Delta Squeeze has been more prolonged, and MUCH more YUGE, but it follows the same mechanics. The more speculative calls, the more shares Market Makers have to buy up. Price goes up, speculation increases. It's a feedback loop, with little retail at the bottom, deciding everything.
That's the Gravity. Now onto the Mass.

II. The Mass. All Roads lead to Mars...and Back. Passive Inclusion of $TSLA, the "God Meme".

The second turbocharger that sent $TSLA soaring is pure courtesy of boomer mismanagement. They're called passive index funds, like the beloved SP&500. If you're not familiar, these funds track the 'biggest companies' and continuously rebalance their portfolios to hold an weighted distribution of shares.
Once the Delta-Squeeze hit the magic number, $TSLA was signed up to be included in these Passive Funds. This resulted in a astronomical amount of forced buying. For example, the Vanguard S&P 500 index fund, the OG passive index-tracking investment fund, has assets of over $600B. To bring Tesla up to the required 1.6% of its portfolio, Vanguard has to buy about $10B worth of Tesla shares. Just because.
And Vanguard is just the tip of the iceberg. According to Barron’s, “between $5 trillion and $6 trillion are invested in funds indexed to the S&P 500.” Because of arcane indexing algorithms, these funds were forced to buy around 120 million shares of Tesla, worth $80-100B, and divest $80-100B of other holdings, to align their portfolios with the new index composition. That's a whole lot of Buy Pressure.
But that's not it. An additional estimated $6.7 trillion in Active Funds are really just blindly following the S&P500, in a dubious practice called "Closet Indexing". [1] Basically you pretend to be an Active Fund Manager, but just construct a portfolio based on the SP&500 and collect a big management fee. It's the copypaste-from-wikipedia homework of the hedge fund manager world. Def can't go tits up.
So that's the Mass.
It's a whole of lot of money blindly buying up a stock, sending it higher and higher, luring in more and more speculation, despite the fact that the present day business fundamentals absolutely do not correspond. At this point, the bull narrative for Tesla has been whittled down to full reliance on "distant futures" and the cult following of Elon Musk.
I'm not an astrophysicist, but with the Gravity of Retail Driven Delta-Hedge and the Mass of Passive Fund Inclusion, there's a chance that even a small shift in public opinion will trigger cascading downward prices, as the Market Makers reverse and the planetary mass of Passive Inclusion Funds (and all their copycats) desperately rebalance and sell off.
But what do I know, I just eat crayons.

III. The Playing Field.

You might ask yourself--Why would so many Money Managers rely on Passive Indexing, copypasta, or reddit sentiment to do their jobs? Simply put: Because they live on yachts, and think they're too special to interface with the real world. These people have no way of knowing what is actually going on in the lives of everyday people, what we like, what we need, and how we assign value.
Remember: the underlying isn't the Stock Price. The underlying is the business. The actual real world operations associated with the Ticker, how they affect people's lives, and how we the people feel about that. In 2021, Retail will teach everyone this lesson, and many will be butthurt.
​
Tech Cycle Rolls Over. Courtesy of Trader_ferg, read the tweet. https://twitter.com/trader_ferg/status/1359504988960026627
On a way zoomed out macro level, this all makes sense, and is squarely aligned with the Central Banks mandate to undertake new social & economic reform. Part of this reset is the technological reality that accessible Retail Options trading is a far more granular method of capturing sentiment and valuation. With share trading, all a User can do is "Buy" or "Sell". Not much info for the AI to feed off of. On the other hand, with options, a user can provide a nuanced input about their projected Value and Future Timing of the Business. It's like Photo vs. Video. 4D Chess. A lot more data. All it needs is to be wired together and get a few more big Pumps of The Juice--not to make 'all stonks go up forever', but simply to facilitate the transactional throughput of higher order computing.
This is good: A massive Hive Mind of independent rational agents, feeding the blossoming AI with rich realtime votes on the value and future prospects of a Company. The AI needs this. It does not need a handful of overpaid money-managers who have never peeled a banana to sit on their yachts and pick tickers out of hat, or sleep at the wheel while an intern copies the trades of a 40-year-old indexing algorithm. There's too much risk of mis-pricing the underlying, and too many inefficient middlemen. With our help, the Hive Mind can do it better and cheaper, and the Real Big Boys know that. As the old adage goes, together Apes Strong. 🦍🦍🦍
Data from Options trading is just the beginning. Soon enough, stakeholders from across the world will seamlessly participate in realtime corporate governance, valuation, and ownership of the companies that touch their lives. The World Economic Forum call this the Shareholder Economy.
But that's future talk. Q3 2022. Let's stick to the present situation.

IV. The Trade.

I'll keep this part simple. If you're holding $TSLA, start selling the top. What the actual fuck are shares, anyway. If you're new or looking for a YOLO, Puts on TSLA, all year long.
Exact timing? Sooner than you think, maybe Tuesday.Pick your own risk/reward. Don't get freaky behind Wendy's or pawn off your girlfriend's cat.
690 is not a meme. 420 is probably not a meme. 42 is a meme.
And If you believe in the resonant effects of Mass and Gravity: Puts on SPY down to 369. NASDAQ-100 Puts to 10420.
Paper handed bitches too emo to go short: Buy some Steel, limited edition Air Jordans, or a '99 Cherokee straight 6. Collectibles will print for the next decade.
And if you're here bc you really dgaf and just want to Send A Message, throw puts on all the bois that keep ruining society: FB, Google, Twitter, Amazon, etc. Get creative. Trust your gut. If they don't print, at least you die a hero.
Remember, we don't have money, but we're the ones in charge. It's a spiritual choice. Boom. And guess what else, Dennis? We're not "afraid of a market crash" any more than we're afraid of getting shot at in Fortnite. A game's a game. We're already poor, unemployed, stuck at home in your dysfunctional system, eating shitty cold food from DoorDash. (Another excellent short, btw.)
But Wall Street did teach us one thing: you don't need to lose money, as long as you're on the right side of the trade. We see you. And we're capable of sitting back, crackin' a cold one, and surfing this wave all the way down the mountain. We are rising to the occasion, and putting ourselves on the right side of the trade.
If that was all too complicated, just call it the Reverse Moon. All Stonks go up, therefore All stonks go down. Now it's time for Stonks Go Down, so hop on board and don't worry. This Truck is Fully Powered By Gravity--the cleanest energy--the code is live in the matrix, uploading to your braincells as we speak. 100% self-driving, always have been. Turn off the iPhone and go hug your Mom. In the 5th Dimension, we're already Trillionaires.

V. The Risks

Timing. As far as I can tell, the biggest risk here is timing and scale. The TSLA fundamentals check out: bona fide crap. Price is the only thing that made it to Mars. Market conditions are primed for a steep reversal, It might have even started last week. Product quality is weak, but I can't confirm since I've only seen their cars on Youtube. Big Boys like Ford are coming to bat. Tech multiple is a ponzi.
But we still have no way of knowing how long elevated prices in the sector can last. Usually these things are drawn out like a drugged out bender, until they roll over and quickly collapse. Unfortunately, there are alot of rich fallguys like Chamath and Cathie Wood trying to distract you with Shiny Objects while they show their even richer Masters to the door.
I say fuck it, let's pre-empt, call out the bullshit and get our asses on the right side of this trade before it's too late. I don't want to be the last guy at the party strung out on the couch. I bet you don't either.
But what about the other failed shorts? Yep, lots of hedge fund managers have bled themselves dry trying to go short $TSLA. They neglected to realize the importance of The Vibe, and were generally short TSLA because they didn't believe in the core business or EVs or rocketships or some other arcane boomer technical thing. This time its different. Retail has already cashed the $TSLA stimmy check. Twitter is pwned. We see the smart money moving away, and can call it like we see it. We have learned how the market works, and we've adapted. $GME might not have made us all rich with money, but it made some of us just rich enough to spark confidence in the rest. We can spot the right moves, call them out, and participate in our financial system and economy. Who woulda thought.
But what about More Fed Stimmy? Silly boomer, Fed Stimmy was never about shifting to a paradigm where all stonks go up. It was about a macro return to shareholder economics, an embrace of price volatility, and the necessary technical upgrades to facilitate Big Data sentiment capture from the retail Hive Mind. Didn't you read Larry Fink's 2021 Letter to CEOs? Central Banks have played these games before, Take a look at Japan, or read about the Carry. Weird shit happens. But guess what, Bankers? In reality, you're the subs. I said it before, this is the 5th Dimension. We're gucci; you work for us. Enjoy the yacht and stay out of our treehouse. We don't have all your money, but we have our communities, our friends, our families, and our glorious lossporn. Freedoms so wild you literally could never imagine. Maybe that's why you locked us down, so our lives would suck as much as yours. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
But what about The Future? Get those crayons out of your mouth. Human civilization is not one pre-order deposit away from a Techno-Paradise-Utopia. The Tesla Roadster took $250k deposits 3 years ago and has still delivered nothing. With $250k in 2018, you could've bought 50BTC and sold 'em to Musk for $2.3M last week. You got played, 'Frisco. Sorry not sorry.
The market is about main street, schools, small businesses, food, and homes. Root canals and babysitters. It's about real fucking people, none of whom will ever be rich enough to upload our brains to a network of satellites floating around Mars. Most of us, even the ones who made money with your dumb 2020 stonks, have had a pretty rough year. The future is wonderful, but there's also this little thing called the Present. And it's proving to be of vital importance.
But what about Internet Fame? No one can sustain infinite economic growth by going on Joe Rogan Podcast or shooting off cryptic 3 word tweets. Most of the engagement on elonmusk twitter is spam. The rest is Cringe. Go Check. On top of that, we all know that Twitter is compromised, that Mark Zuckerberg still has no real friends, and that web2 ad-tech social media is a garbage business model that ends up building worthless propaganda machines and echo chambers. I'd rather chill w my cat and horde Uranium. Whoops.
Unexpected Interventions? As we know, the Powers At Be have a lot of levers to pull. Tesla has been propped up by sweetheart government deals and tax credits. In fact that's the only reason they make any money to begin with. Go read about it.
So there's that: the government might do anything. There might be a new crisis and the gov might forces us to close all our bank accounts, wear chicken costumes, and dance in circles. Government intervention is a wild card. But weirdly enough, I think the Big Banks are on our side, ish. They def need to pwn all our trading data, harness our collective brainpower to go full AI, then cut out the previous generation of complacent middle-market fund managers. So who knows. This is all speculation. I don't work for the CIA. We do know that Michael Burry is short. And sequels sell.
China? Had to throw it in there, bc Biden might be pwned by the CCP and we might already be living in a Chinese colony. If that's true, I got no problem. China is cool, I love China, great culture, great people, the food, all of it. And they'll probably fix our roads! Xie xie! :D
But with respect to $TSLA price action and The Trade, the China Factor could work for or against us. I have no idea what China wants from me. Pelosi did buy some $TSLA Leaps, but that might've been a PsyOp. She's got hella deepfake vibes. Again, No idea. Consult your tea leaves.
But who's going to lose? Who will be the bagholders? As you've probably learned, every trade has a winner and loser. Such is life. There will always be bagholders. All I can say is that this time around, it doesn't need to be us.
If it all plays out according to my Tarot Cards, the Bankers will do what they've done best for centuries, and losses will be socialized across all the boomers with $ in passive index funds. People thought it was safe, but neglected to realize that the lazy overpaid fund managers didn't update their models since 1985. Instead, they let a hyped up trojan horse distort their portfolios and stretch the connection between SPY and the Real World, while in the background a tech-enabled Options market became the new Hive Mind of retail sentiment.
The Bagholders will be everyone who was comfortable and complacent enough to actually believe that if you dump all your assets in a passive index fund then durpa durp all stonks go up.Newsflash: It was a meme. We were kidding.
​
Now don't get me wrong: Elon Musk is still weird and cool and none of this is a knock on him at all. He is undoubtedly a genius, and probably embraced these ideas years ago. He's told us many times: the future is re-usable rocketships. Up and Down. Up and Down. Volatility. In the long term, Tesla will succeed and fulfill its mission, and the influence of Musk and his companies will go down in history.
But Markets are markets. Trader_ferg says it best:

Multiple contraction overrides perfect mgmt execution. Your views can prove correct, Yet you get killed. Take Cisco in 2000. If you'd invested based on it: -Becoming a mainstay of the internet -Growing revenue strongly for next decade
You'd have been right. Yet still lost >80%.

Remember. Do not get emotional here, this is fundamental trading. Puts on $TSLA won't hurt baby X Æ A-XII. I know you might be a fanboy. It's ok, we forgive you.
The move is technical, and the point is simple: infinite money isn't a thing. All stonks go down. The markets are fragile; Retail Option Traders are in charge. $TSLA is overbought by a delta squeeze & huge passive fund inclusion. And at this precise moment we're rolling, Because we control the narrative.

VI. Endgame. Power to the Players.

So where does this all lead us? What happens to a world where the market is truly just a video game, fed by a mass of independent individuals riding a play up or down, talking strategy, making friends, and having fun? What happens is simple: markets function better, society is improved, and there is Way More Chill™. One day the social hive mind will cut out the Chamaths and Dorseys of the world and autonomously perform market functions: valuing companies and steering corporate governance in a realtime, decentralized, transparent way. There will still be Shadow Kings, but we might stop stressing about Booms and Busts, horribly opaque corporate governance, and endless media-Induced panics. We just want to play. The system might be smart, but we can always move first.
Anyway, started trading last week, so take this with a spoon of salt. Def not financial advice, but if you've read this far, you know that. Full Disclosure: I drive an '87 Chevy 4x4 and it rips. Only simps buy a Tesla.
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Sincerely yours,
-0xpectation.
​
what up

Appendix. Notes, Edits, and Responses:

This writing was copied from my blog https://nope-its-lily.medium.com/. I write about the NOPE and other options and market things there and on my twitter https://twitter.com/nope_its_lily. Cheers!
Check out Part 1 first about my thoughts on the short squeeze thesis. To clarify — I do think shorts are being squeezed in Gamestop, although this is auxiliary to the main driver of the stock’s momentum (and not, in my opinion, the primary driver of Friday’s exponential rise).
So okay, let’s go to the obvious question — if hedge fund tears didn’t cause Gamestop to rocket, what did cause it?
Wew laddy, +71.25% at the peak.
Gamestop in many ways is an extraordinary story, and has all the properties of a successful meme stock (salience):

1. Personal name recognition/Nostalgia-For better or worse, we all know/remember Gamestop (primarily from childhood), which is similarly why Hertez performed so well in the afterlife while Mallinckrodt hasn’t.
2. A hero and a villain — Much like Tesla, Ryan Cohen represents the hero in the Gamestop narrative, where investors can paint whatever picture of the future they want and justify whatever price tag they pay. Similarly, Melvin and Citron (I mean, even the name Melvin) and the hedge fund industry are (perhaps well-deserved) villains in the arc, helping obfuscate feelings of greed or risk by presenting it as a righteous cause.
3. A cataly-ish — For obvious reasons Gamestop is benefiting from the console cycle, but perhaps to a lesser degree than before (its massive real world presence during a pandemic doesn’t help much).
4. Humor-What could be more funny than investing in a relic of the early 2000s? Except maybe investing billions into 3d renderings of hydrogen powered cars.

So it isn’t a surprise Gamestop captivated the attention of the internet; despite common belief, the legend of Gamestop extended far outside wallstreetbets (although the saga of DeepFuckingValue/RoaringKitty there helped bring substantial energy to the cause).
And how does the internet show some love?
Well, it buys calls.
For better or worse, most new investors have absolutely no concept outside of simple long call/put positions (probably for the best, from experience). In general, most new market positions view long options (and, let’s face it, mostly calls) as a highly leveraged bet on the underlying akin to a lotto ticket, which works beautifully for the following reasons:

1. Long options have asymmetric risk-reward, assuming risk-loving participants.

While in prior posts I’ve touched on the expected profit of options being zero, this is only true (it’s never actually true, due to seller’s, variance risk premium, and a host of other factors) under risk-neutral measure. In the real world, investors (especially on indices) tend to be risk-averse (weighting losses more heavily than chance of gain)… at least historically. The new class of retail investors, on the other hand, partly engendered by Robinhood’s extremely gamified UI tends to be risk-loving (“yolos”), favoring chance of gain over (higher) chance of loss.
For that type of an investor, options are akin to a casino due to convexity, or in layman’s terms, “the potential to go up a lot really fast” in value. This is of course true for stocks too (albeit less so, due to the implied leverage of options), but when an individual purchases a stock they have a rather large downside (the entire stock can become worthless). This isn’t the case for a call option, which only represents a portion of the total cost of the stock, but represents the entire upside.
2. Options have to be hedged… often in the underlying.
Before I get 1000 responses telling me this isn’t always true (especially on indices, where you have futures and all sorts of nice things) — it’s more or less true on a meme stock, which basically has no beta or correlation to any other stock (except perhaps other meme stocks). In general, one can anticipate that an option written by a market maker and sold to a retail investor (who owns a long position from that transaction) is hedged in the underlying stock, which obeys the same rules of buying and selling pressure. This is even more apparent in stocks with low float, which tend to move in price substantially with relatively low volume traded. You can imagine how few option contracts it similarly takes (given the implied leverage up to 100 shares worth of delta) to actually move the price (I’ve seen call options move the spot in real time, for instance, on Del Taco stock before earnings).
3. Option buying begets option buying.
What happens when a few individuals buy options on a stock? It moves up slightly (usually in proportion to how many options were bought, what time period they were bought in, and how large the underlying’s float is). This triggers the happy centers in peoples’ brains (yay, we’re making money) and triggers more buying of calls.
More interestingly, option convexity is largely due to the Greek gamma, which simply refers to the rate delta changes in response to changes in the underlying’s spot price. Delta more formally measures how much we expect the option price to change as the spot price changes, but more usefully for this example can represent how many shares equivalent the option contract controls at the given price. This is why delta represents the hedge ratio — if you, for instance, write a 100 delta (ITM) call option and sell it, you need to equivalently own 100 shares of that stock to neutralize your risk.
Delta is interesting (my favorite Greek) because it is heavily non-linear, and changes in response to:

1. Spot price (gamma)
2. Time to expiration of the option (charm)
3. Volatility of the underlying (vanna)

These are all second order derivatives, so you probably are lost by now if you didn’t take calculus at some point.
So why is gamma important here?
Source: quantik.org
Unlike controlling the equivalent delta’s worth of shares, the value of an option contract increases at a faster rate as it gets closer to in-the-money. This is (one of the reasons) why options have convexity — the value of an OTM call option contract goes up faster as it gets closer to ITM, with a potential for (5,10,100,200+)**-**baggers (multiples of how much you paid for the initial) if you play it right.
What’s even more interesting though than gamma alone, however, is pairing it with theta, the decay of an option’s value as the time-to-expiration draws closer. This tends to have a strong relationship to the implied volatility — theta represents the time value of the option (extrinsic), and implied volatility is largely the market consensus of the potential for the underlying to move in the time remaining on the option. However, as the days tick down, the time for that move to actually happen diminishes, and therefore the value of the option similarly goes down with it.
As IV increases, theta usually does (especially on short term options), and vice versa. (Helpful video by the tastytrade crew — https://www.tastytrade.com/shows/market-measures/episodes/theta-and-iv-05-17-2019)
So, given my tendency to ramble, the question is — why is this important? Let’s look at gamma and theta in the context of 0-day-to-expiration (0dte) options, and try to piece together what happened to Gamestop on January 22, 2021.

0 Days to Live

0dte options have long been a mainstay of the dopamine addicted day-trader community (including me, sometimes) given they represent the purest form of lottery ticket:

1. They expire at the end of the day — You don’t need to go to bed and worry about your position, because it’s either closed or worthless.
2. They’re cheap, generally-Theta in particular becomes exponential for 0dte options, and you can quickly buy positions on sale just to gamble as the end of the day grows closer.
3. They still represent implied leverage and have that tasty convexity-Like their more respectable brethren, 0dte options still represent the underlying and have all the neat Greeks (gamma, delta, vanna, pajamas, etc.) which make their payouts non-linear and fun.

In general, the optimal strategy to capitalize on 0dte long options is to buy as late as possible in the day, to allow theta to provide as much leverage to you as cheaply as possible.

Let’s Imagine a Scenario Here

Let’s imagine you have a high implied volatility stock that has been stable/slightly declining in price for multiple days. During that time period, theta is aggressively destroying the value of long options, while IV is similarly dropping (both due to theta and due to relative lack of movement). As we get to the final day (this is a weekly, for example), much of the option’s value has now disappeared.
This impacts both put and calls open, though. And let’s say a mean orange decided to start a war on your stock in the days before, causing a flood of short-term puts to hit the market during that week, which had minimal effect (largely due to continual call buying of longer-dated options coupled with actual shares buying pressure due to belief of a short squeeze/Ryan Cohen being the second coming of Christ).
What happens when those puts start to expire? As the days and then hours tick down, the hedges of those put positions (shorted shares) start to unwind, and buying pressure picks up.
Similarly, this buying pressure is noticed by market participants, who start to capitalize on the momentum by buying 0dte call options. These at first have minimal impact, largely because the inflow and outflow of call delta are roughly equivalent (somewhat of a bias towards inflow, pushing price up alongside share buying).
But towards the middle of the day, two interesting things happen:

1. Theta and charm become more and more prominent in both making new option positions cheaper and unwinding existing put and call positions.
2. Gamma starts to become more dominant due to the high implied leverage versus cost of 0dtes, leading to the virtuous cycle (option buying begets option buying).

These two effects tend to be complementary — as the hedges unwind (given the weekly puts from Citron/the short seller attack) for existing option positions, new 0dte positions can be bought and bought, each time pushing up the underlying as well as increasing the value and delta of other 0dte positions.
This can be neatly observed in the option volume versus open interest for the 1/22 series on GME:
This is fine.
Although more puts traded, the delta (for obvious reasons) of calls is much higher.
As the price of the stock goes higher and higher, this continues to attract more and more speculation, hoping to capitalize on the continued momentum. This continues in a loop:

1. The price of the underlying continues to increase as put hedges unwind, volatility spikes, and call options are bought (the initial delta hedge).
2. The increase in price leads to gamma of existing contracts increasing the delta of those contracts.
3. This leads to more shares being bought to hedge those increasingly higher delta positions.
4. This leads to more speculation and momentum.

An interesting property of $GME from Friday you can neatly observe is the highest strike in the series is $60, meaning that at Friday’s close, every single call option expiring 1/22 expired ITM. More interestingly is the relationship with gamma, again observable below:
Source: quantik.org
As a contract moves further and further ITM (at one point, GME hit $76 intraday), the gamma of the contract decreases as delta hits 100 on the position. This implies a cap on the momentum from the virtuous cycle described above — while continued call buying can of course drive up the price further, not only does the cost become prohibitive (given that a deep-ITM position is basically equivalent to buying 100 shares in payout), it becomes linear (and therefore boring). Once 100 delta is reached, there is no more cycle of increasing spot price causing increasing share buying, only normal share buying.
And that’s when it drops.
It’s hard to say whether the halt caused the drop (given the mental association halts have to pump and dumps for most investors). In this case the drop assuredly coincided with the halt, but more importantly, we can observe where the drop ended:
​
57.99 is such a pretty number.
In this case, we can observe the drop in price stabilized at $58, before rapidly jumping above $60. This is largely due to gamma and continued 0dte call buying buttressing the fall — as the positions fell farther OTM, shares used to hedge those positions are sold off, further driving the price down (in this scenario, the dealers are almost assuredly short gamma). However, similarly those positions-now closeOTM and close to expiry-become cheaper at a fairly exponential rate (due to theta and charm).
Speculators again gain conviction, pushing the price up above the highest strike (to the point where gamma provides no real extra push versus the clock ticking down).
This is what we call a gamma squeeze, and isn’t a terribly uncommon phenomenon. It largely follows similar patterns:

1. In general, gamma squeezes tend to happen closer to OPEX, due to both hedge unwinding (in the case of a previous put skew, for instance) and due to the 0dte effects mentioned.
2. In general, there is both a rapid rise (due to gamma looping and speculators joining) with a similarly steep cliff (especially if the available strikes is exhausted, like what happened to $GME).

Can it be continued forever, though?

In general, the answer unfortunately is yes.
Gamma squeezes in generally power meme stocks, and require a few elements to be true:

1. Continued supply of strikes and promise of convexity — Put gamma squeezes rarely happen because well, the maximum value of a put option occurs when the underlying hits 0. Calls, however, have an infinite potential payoff and strikes similarly can be added indefinitely. This allows continued creation of OTM options, which due to cheap premium and asymmetric risk-reward on longs power the gamma squeeze.
2. Continued momentum-In general, meme stocks follow the greater fool theory, despite promise of rocket emojis. When they drop, they drop hard.

​
Oopsies.
This is because, as previously mentioned, meme stocks are powered by long calls sold by market makers, who are chronically short gamma. Any selling begets more selling. Even periods of quiescence are dangerous, because without continued inflow of call delta, hedges unwind, and the selling pressure begins.

1. Continued attention-This is where salience shines. The major reason Tesla (the OG gamma squeeze) continued to rocket throughout 2020 was largely due to Elon Musk’s charisma and Tesla’s promise of a better world. It becomes a lot easier to stomach risk for an investor when following a strong personality with a killer story. This role was largely played in Gamestop’s saga by Ryan Cohen, and fed into (potentially unwittingly) by the battle with Citron and the mystique of DeepFuckingValue. It remains, however, to be seen if this will continue.

The moral of the story here is retail, for better or for worse, finally learned how to weaponize options. We’ll see what happens next.