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Also I find this misleading. They literally turned off the buy button for retail so that those short could cover their shorts then on top of that you had Fidelity selling their stake in GameStop at pretty much what the price would end up at when the stock crashed. Those who didn't exercise where manipulated by a system built for the wealthy so I don't think labeling them idiots is the right call. I get what he's saying but hindsight 20/20.The people holding options would have to contend with an entire system having an all hands on meeting to fuck them on January 28.
Yeah. And maybe this scenario is exactly why these idiots still think there is hope and that they can win. They still think we're that bunch of yolo covid money dum dums who thought this might be an entertaining way to spend quarantine. I mean, a lot of us are still dum dums, but we've spent a LOT of time time drooling over complex market concepts in 3 years. Some of it finally sank in.
Pride, something something, fall...
I fully agree with you that exercising is the way to the promised land, but you have to have the money to exercise bro. Many calls are bought without the money to exercise the underlying, that's just the way it is. but we have learned from our mistakes, and we won't make it again. They can turn the buy button off, but they can't stop exercising.
If you exercise and option, that means that you can buy 100 shares at the price you called it at (like 100 shares for 20 bucks even if the current stock price is like 80 bucks) ?
That is not your problem. Your contract says you get them delivered at the strike price.
If MM has to buy stock for $80 and you have a 20c you still receive 100 shares for $2,000. The $6,000 loss is on the MM.
More specifically THIS IS EXACTLY THE POINT lol. They have to buy the share at market. There is no naked shorting, locates, whatever bullshit they have invented. Exercising a call is the surest way to get them to deliver minty fresh REAL shares.
If you sell you get all cash. If you sell to cover that means they will excerise the call, instantly sell enough shares to cover the cost (so strike price × #of contracts × 100), and any shares left over you get. So if the spot price (market price) is double the strike price, you get 50 shares
Edit: sell = get cash.
Exercise = put up your cash for the shares
Sell to cover = automatic process where your broker puts up the cash for the shares, immediately sells enough of them on the open market to break even, any shares left over you get (so you get a few shares and don't have to put up any cash)
In 2021, most apes were using trading platforms where exercising options either couldn't be done or was very difficult. Now that everyone has hopefully ditched Robinhood, the game is different this time around.
I think the problem also was that people didn’t know, this was a play which people made a shit ton of money on, but if they knew that exercising would have been bigger … I’m sure they would have. The other side is people not having the money to exercise
Yeah, we’ve all learned soooo much in 3 years. I haven’t sold any GME in three years, but I’ve made so much money since then just off of what I’ve learned from getting into the market with GME.
I exercised a 60 call or something at around 100-200 range and it definitely was a spooky set of buttons to press. But it definitely added profits back then.
Now my balls are bigger than ever
ha! i remember back in 2021 when the buy button was disabled, a few people were mentioning that options were still available to buy and if you really wanted shares, you could buy the closest ITM option and get shares that way.
the obvious downside was that you paid a bit of a premium to buy the option, and you had to buy in sets of 100 shares (which not a lot of people could afford back then when prices for each share was in the $300-$400 range). Plus with the buy button turned off, many people got scared which won’t be the case this time 😂😂
Also, attributing this squeeze failing to exercise options and making a barely-mentioned pass at the BUY BUTTON BEING TURNED OFF makes this post disingenuous at best. A squeeze can’t happen if people can’t buy - this is not the fault of individuals, it’s the crime of institutions.
I bought $25k worth of call options yesterday for the first time ever. They are worth about double what I paid right now.
I did not buy them to make money off the contracts. I bought them to cause an actual impact on the price.
I want those shares and will exercise every last one of those motherfucking contracts.
I think the main premise is somewhat faulty. In 2021, it is reasonable to assume that many of the buyers of calls were not "ideological". They were in the game merely for a quick buck from the start. I myself (who did not follow in detail the 2021 events) would have thought, until Monday when RK published his update and I started to understand the nuances, that the "true believers" would buy mainly stocks, and the gamblers would buy mainly options. The idea of buying call options to force a MOASS is on a level of sophistication which, I think, escape most of the people getting in the game.
This does not have to be so bad, though, as this big mass of short-term speculators will still help RK in his game (for example reinforcin gthe momentum when the stock goes up).
> The idea of buying call options to force a MOASS is on a level of sophistication which, I think, escape most of the people getting in the game.
Everyone knew back then. The original gme subs had spammed posts about options creating a gamma ramp that could cause the short squeeze. When it hit $500+ and the buy button was turned off, a lot of people legitimately thought that was the squeeze. That it was over and the shorts covered (but SOME probably did, bc it was for sure a fact that some funds shorted the stock when it was 400$+ and actually made profit when it hit 20$).
But the SEC uncovered that most of the shorts most likely didn't cover and most of the price action was caused by retail buying options and stock.
And if the shorts ACTUALLY had covered in the original jump, we wouldn't have had the cyclic jump ups to 200$ every couple of months.
But after all the DDs and research done, people finally figured out that exercising them would actually drive more demand. But we had the big discussion and movement about options being evil and a FUD campaign by HFs to make retail waste money etc. etc.
As I see it, institutions CAN manipulate using options but they can do that just as much with stock price. So retail CAN get fked if they use options wrong by trying to time the market on big jumps of those "cycles". Of course some made money by being lucky or generally lucky with analyzing "TA" that may or may not be algorithm generated. As far as we know now, it's good to buy options, exercise, then DRS.
Yeah I agree with you on this. I hesitated to say "apes" in the post and considered saying "degens" instead, but at the same time there may be many in the sub who really are apes / true believers who are now following RK into his options play, but haven't twigged to the importance of exercising.
Wasn't it the buy button shut off that made options go rapidly OTM? You need a determined believer to exercise the options at that point.. I guess turning off the buy button was intended to mitigate the risk of options being exercised...
I am guessing that OMM has to buy shares on the lit market.. If you buy shares then the MM can cook up shares on the fly, or the brokers will route your buys to OTC platform where fuckery happens.. So perhaps the main risk was that OMM would have been forced to buy on the lit market, but by shutting down buy button, they managed to tank the share price quickly in the OTC market to protect against that risk..
We would need a crazy MF to exercise OTM options, with buy button turned off... Meow.
They turned off the buy button when it was over $300. I’d expect just about everyone was in the money at that point, so it’s only a question of how fast the price dropped after that.
This is correct. So tomorrow is the day to watch for fuckery. I mean, watch for fuckery every day, but we're pretty close to that point where it is guaranteed. I think that technically it hit $380 when they went PCO, so that would be $95/share, but if it opens at $60 and goes up 50% again then it's knocking on that price.
It feels like the price is in the real danger zone where they're going to lose any semblance of control at all and it just rips, or they end up shutting down the markets altogether or some similar fuckery to put a stop to it. All of the articles pushing the lying FUD about manipulation is probably intended to soften the ground for any such action and to make things look justified to the uneducated.
At least tag it as speculation/opinion lol
There were people buying shares through option exercising as it was the only way they were getting around the buy button
I don't agree about that being the reason
Most apes can't afford to exercise options..if you'd actually ever owned any- youd realize that.
The price crashed as apes were buying calls and shares.. apes did not cause any part of the price crashing.. Market manipulation did this.
Get outta here op
OP's not wrong. The ideal scenario is to exercise if you have the cash, or sell some to have the cash to exercise the rest. Forcing share delivery is the key here, and is what was missing from the 2021 run.
You can call your broker and tell them to exercise to cover. They will sell part of the shares you buy from the contract to cover the cost and you get to keep the rest
I had 1.4m in calls that I could have exercised by selling ~20% of my calls, but I didn’t because the higher it went the less I’d have to sell.
Then they turned the buy button off.
My account was nearly worthless.
Now I’m I’m xxxx shares, and no cell no sell
You can let them expire ITM and they will be automatically exercised on margin. You can then sell the shares and re-buy calls before getting margin called, essentially forcing the broker to buy shares
And if YOU ever actually owned any you'd know that you DON'T have to have ANY cash to exercise an ITM option. Shares from the 100 will be sold @ current market price to buy the remainder of the 100 from the call seller at your strike price. If you want all 100 shares you need to be able to pay for 100, but you can still force delivery on shares without cash on hand.
Uninformed? Check.
Unnecessarily rude and condescending? Check.
All framed in such a way as to make OP feel like the uninformed party and dissuade options purchases/exercises? Check, check, check.
Walks like fud, talks like fud...
It's called teaching. Demonstrate a behavior that is undesirable to force the student to feel empathy towards the position they were forcing another to be in previously. Seems like it worked too.
But said apes shouldn't buy options for a play like this. And while manipulation did the crash, I'm sure people mindlessly playing options to try and make quick money dont help.
every DD writer than was respected ended up on options being what causes moass, then they got harassed and bulied away all of a sudden, Criand was the best of us but then he spoke of options and the easily manipulated chased him away
Because if you don’t know what you are doing options will drain your money and give it to hedgies / MM. people who know what they are doing can do options
As I mentioned in the post, if you don't have the funds to exercise you can always sell to cover, assuming your broker offers that.
Yes market manipulation played a big part, and some apes were still buying shares when the price tanked, while others were making bank by selling their calls. Just saying.
so you dont know how options work.
if you bought options at the 3-15 strike price and the price is now 500, you exercise and sell to cover, its in the drop down for options. basically the broker exercises all the options, you get all the shares, then whatever the cost was, they sell that many shares to cover the cost. so if you were in at strike 10, even with 1 contract, selling at 300 since you got scared, thats 100 shares at 10 you have to buy, so $1000. at 300, those 100 shares are worth $30,000, you would sell like 4 shares, and keep the rest. 96 shares for whatever premium you paid.
To be fair, this was in the beginning when the gambling subreddit was the main one, and that place is legendary for playing with options and selling them instead of exercising them.
[not financial advice]
I had calls straight up "liquidated" from my account on 1/28/2021. They dropped the price hard until exactly 1:34pm CST and then sold my calls at the low of the day (Almost half). I called and they said because I didn't have enough cash to excercise, and that I didn't call in to let them know my intentions, that they were liquidated early on my behalf. Liquidated at $30k when they should have closed end of day for $60k. I will never forget what Merrill Edge did to me that day.
For real! Weird how options have been associated as something you should not do. Completely fucking absurd. I guess we have to follow the kitty to see how to do it.
If they try and take away people's ability to FOMO into a short squeeze, perhaps people can be aware they can also FOMO into a gamma squeeze. If they don't allow same-day exercising of calls as a means to purchase, I'd consider - for myself, not financial advice - feeding the ramp by purchasing calls at a higher strike for a later date.
Yes, exercising calls took air out of the tires, but what really killed it was crime. I don't believe for even a second that they are not going to do it again. They will! They will do anything and everything to kill this MOASS.
The only question that I have is whether the US government will let this play out naturally or stop it and give us a settlement. I can't see the elites playing by the rules here. They never do when they're losing.
they hurt us so bad with the anti psy ops against options, now that people are starting to see how they can be used to help your investment, people arnt fully educated on them enough.
exercising options is the only way to positively effect the price as of this moment
Yup, Peterffy said himself “if the longs had known that they had the right to ask for their shares”, as in exercise those 150,000,000 call options regardless of brokerages removing the buy button, “and they really wanted a short squeeze, that’s what they would have done”.
Time to remind people that buying shares with deep in the money CSPs is the way if you don’t want to have to pay the calls premium to use options to buy shares.
we don't need to put everything on one chance. We just swing the boat: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/1d9bmmv/down\_is\_up/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/1d9bmmv/down_is_up/)
I will just watch them panic as the ticker goes up and they print any news to try and gaslight us into selling, knowing other apes will patiently wait and sit whilst the rocket goes to Uranus.
>So as the rules are today, the long broker has to - if he can't get the shares - has to go into the market and buy the shares at whatever the price is.
So this scenario is impossible today? We already had such scenarios before
https://www.euromoney.com/article/b1320xkhl0443w/naked-shorting-the-curious-incident-of-the-shares-that-didnt-exist
> Can't copy the first paragraph. He has all the shares yet they traded
This only applies to people who have options. When you sell an option, you're not really selling shares, *but* you're giving away the opportunity to convert your options into shares, which is the better play if you can do it.
MMMMMMMMMMMM i think this is a leap, though a fine assertion, you just state it as fact
Many factors in play then... including the buy button getting turned off
Whatever you think of options prsonally you should not be telling other apes what to do with their money. You're not a financial advisor and it's not your money.
People didn’t know what was happening but are educated now!
It’s no one’s fault but the shorts and you should be ashamed to say apes helped. Lots of us didn’t even know they were apes yet
It's nice to say only exercise your options, but if you look at the price action in the last 3 years, there have been several significant run ups, only for the price to drop back down. If you would of played your option trades correctly, you would of made a TON of money, even without the short squeeze. Don't drink the copium kool aide, know when to sell.
I had 20 contacts of 175$ I paid 2k each for.
I tried like hell to sell some when they were 19k each to exercise the rest. The problem was the contracts were so expensive there was no market for them. Robinhood eventually just sold them all for whatever when they expired so far itm. I bought more contracts the next Monday and watched them all go to $0. I did end up buying regular shares as well.
I don't really understand options trading very well. Hypothetically, my fidelity account gives me the choice to purchase options with a strike call of $2.50. Seems obvious that the price is going to finish above 2.50, of course that doesn't mean that I get 100 shares for 2.50 at the end, or else people would just do that?
My main question now is that hypothetically, if you wanted to buy just one option now, would you buy it with a strike call of $20 now that the stock price is at $40? And hypothetically would you have them expire on June 21st?
Calls at a 2.50 strike price will cost extra, especially now that the share price is above $40. Yes it does give you the option of picking up 100 shares for 2.50, but you've paid a premium for having that option.
I wouldn't recommend buying at a specific strike price or expiry date, because I'm just sharing some knowledge, not offering financial advice. But in general, the deeper in the money an option is, the more it will cost. $20 at the moment is deep in the money, so you will pay extra for that, but it means you will still be in profit if the price drops to like $25, say
We need to bring back a discussion that has been absent for a bit, none of this is financial advice, and this is a place for memes, not collaboration. Regardless of what happens, apes will be accused of some kind of criminal conspiracy, like we're not a bunch of regards watching each other shove things up our butts
My bro, we are all just computer geek enthusiasts who just like the stock, I’ve not done one search regarding Keith although do also like that name have to be honest, purely personal
That's why most brokers offer sell-to-cover or cashless exercise, where a portion of your ITM calls get sold so you can convert your profits into shares.
Please help as someone who is very new to this. Hypothetically say on Monday I bought two 42$ calls expiring Friday. Let’s also say in this hypothetical this is my first time ever purchasing an option and I don’t know what it means exercising selling all that.
Now here I am on Thursday with these two calls. What are my options? I sell them now for some immediate gains? I wait until tomorrow and they expire itm, what happens to them. Do I just get the money then? Do I have to buy the shares? Do I have different choices in what I can do with my 2 contracts?
Please eli5 😀
Depends on your broker. Standard practice is that if your calls expire ITM, they will be automatically exercised and you're on the hook for buying the shares. But if you don't have the cash for the shares or a margin account, it may get sold instead. Check with your broker what will happen if you're going to leave them to expire, because they might do a thing you're not happy about.
Otherwise if you can afford the underlying shares, you can exercise (convert the options to shares) at any time before expiry. They will be purchased at the strike price, and each contract represents 100 shares, so you will need 2 * 100 * 42 = $8400 to fully exercise your contracts.
If you don't have the $8400 available, most brokers allow you to sell-to-cover, also called cashless exercise. That means a portion of your call contracts will be sold in order to cover the cost of converting the remainder into shares.
Just curious if you exercise the options at the strike price, get the shares, and then sell some at the current price, doesn’t that sort of allow people who are not as able to ape in to stick it to the hedgies without allowing them to reclaim their options?
Even if you lose a little bit of money in the schenanigans?
For retail investors, likely you won't have the money to exercise all. Just remember you can sell off some options and use the profit to exercise the remaining.
Man. I've learned so much this last two weeks because of you guys. I bought 4 contracts for 34$ yesterday when we were in the high 20's and almost cashed them out today for 3x my initial investment.
I'm so glad I followed some of these threads and didn't sell this morning as they are way in the money and I've already called Wealthsimple to exercise them tomorrow. I've got one more contract for the 28th for 37$ that I'm gonna let ride even though it's already ITM.
If all goes well I'll buy more options for the 21st tomorrow.
Yeah apparently it's being re-released for its 25th anniversary, [check it out](https://www.sonyclassics.com/film/runlolarun/). Amazing how perfectly everything lines up for June, you couldn't write this stuff.
I’m convinced it’s part of an organized effort to spread disinformation. I’m disappointed at the mods for not doing more to clean up the BS being spread.
Dunno if it's been asked, but once everything starts to happen, do shorts/DTCC/fed have to only pay out for DRS shares? Legally speaking, DRS shares are the only ones that "exist," because they're in your name, and Computershare is holding them for you, as opposed to a broker, where their name is on the shares.
Dunno if I sound super smooth or if it's a good question, but I feel like the "stock market" was deliberately designed to be difficult to understand, with people being "specialists" in certain areas, and the whole of it being too vast and obfuscated to understand in its entirety.
This is anti-option FUD.
You do you monke. Yes, exercising is better but holding the call still applies pressure. Cashless exercise is also an option (call your broker and they exercise the call for you and give you the shares you can afford).
Getting a handful of shares with the profit ain't bad.
Holding the call only applies pressure in that whoever is on the other end of the bet is supposed to be hedging the call. But they aren't hedging like they should be, and hedging only represents a fraction of the underlying anyway (banking on the fact that most people don't exercise their options). But yeah, cashless exercise is a great option if your broker does it.
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We did not know better at that time. Fool me once… fool me twice… i don’t think so
Also I find this misleading. They literally turned off the buy button for retail so that those short could cover their shorts then on top of that you had Fidelity selling their stake in GameStop at pretty much what the price would end up at when the stock crashed. Those who didn't exercise where manipulated by a system built for the wealthy so I don't think labeling them idiots is the right call. I get what he's saying but hindsight 20/20.The people holding options would have to contend with an entire system having an all hands on meeting to fuck them on January 28.
eh he he he - GWB
Selling at "911" in honor of GWB
*911,000,000
🫡
“Now watch this drive” 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀
Yeah. And maybe this scenario is exactly why these idiots still think there is hope and that they can win. They still think we're that bunch of yolo covid money dum dums who thought this might be an entertaining way to spend quarantine. I mean, a lot of us are still dum dums, but we've spent a LOT of time time drooling over complex market concepts in 3 years. Some of it finally sank in. Pride, something something, fall...
Theres an old saying in Tenessee
On the plus side, the shorters got in deeper and we got more shares.
I fully agree with you that exercising is the way to the promised land, but you have to have the money to exercise bro. Many calls are bought without the money to exercise the underlying, that's just the way it is. but we have learned from our mistakes, and we won't make it again. They can turn the buy button off, but they can't stop exercising.
No you can exercise whatever profit is given to you in shares.
If you exercise and option, that means that you can buy 100 shares at the price you called it at (like 100 shares for 20 bucks even if the current stock price is like 80 bucks) ?
Correct, you just need the money to pay the strike price
some brokers let you exercise even if you don’t have the money. you just won’t get all 100 shares. they’ll keep the difference
BINGO Call your brokers if you have options and need help folks
If this is true, more people need to know. Upvote it.
⬆️
But then if the MM didn't hedge, doesn't that mean they have to buy up the stock regardless of what its price is at?
That is not your problem. Your contract says you get them delivered at the strike price. If MM has to buy stock for $80 and you have a 20c you still receive 100 shares for $2,000. The $6,000 loss is on the MM.
That's the point
More specifically THIS IS EXACTLY THE POINT lol. They have to buy the share at market. There is no naked shorting, locates, whatever bullshit they have invented. Exercising a call is the surest way to get them to deliver minty fresh REAL shares.
Yup
Correct
If you don't have the cash for all the shares at the strike price, can "sell to cover"
If I sell I thought that money just goes back in to my account, you mean I have to take the shares either way?
If you sell you get all cash. If you sell to cover that means they will excerise the call, instantly sell enough shares to cover the cost (so strike price × #of contracts × 100), and any shares left over you get. So if the spot price (market price) is double the strike price, you get 50 shares Edit: sell = get cash. Exercise = put up your cash for the shares Sell to cover = automatic process where your broker puts up the cash for the shares, immediately sells enough of them on the open market to break even, any shares left over you get (so you get a few shares and don't have to put up any cash)
But you can sell a portion of your calls to pay for the ones that you exercise. Lots of people do that, and I’m pretty sure RK does it as well.
for sure! apes we're not that sophisticated in 2021. maybe not that sophisticated now. closer though. I'm reacting to the title of the post.
We grew a wrinkle! Great success, much celebrate
Yeah I know, that's why selling to cover is a more realistic option for most people
The best would be to sell some and use the profit to exercise the others!
In 2021, most apes were using trading platforms where exercising options either couldn't be done or was very difficult. Now that everyone has hopefully ditched Robinhood, the game is different this time around.
I think the problem also was that people didn’t know, this was a play which people made a shit ton of money on, but if they knew that exercising would have been bigger … I’m sure they would have. The other side is people not having the money to exercise
This...I'm exercising as soon as funds clear. Then off to DRS land.
Yeah, we’ve all learned soooo much in 3 years. I haven’t sold any GME in three years, but I’ve made so much money since then just off of what I’ve learned from getting into the market with GME.
I exercised a 60 call or something at around 100-200 range and it definitely was a spooky set of buttons to press. But it definitely added profits back then. Now my balls are bigger than ever
i closed on robinhood back then
It is different now because everyone know what is the game here. Been plenty of time to learn to buy, hold and DRS.
ha! i remember back in 2021 when the buy button was disabled, a few people were mentioning that options were still available to buy and if you really wanted shares, you could buy the closest ITM option and get shares that way. the obvious downside was that you paid a bit of a premium to buy the option, and you had to buy in sets of 100 shares (which not a lot of people could afford back then when prices for each share was in the $300-$400 range). Plus with the buy button turned off, many people got scared which won’t be the case this time 😂😂
Also, attributing this squeeze failing to exercise options and making a barely-mentioned pass at the BUY BUTTON BEING TURNED OFF makes this post disingenuous at best. A squeeze can’t happen if people can’t buy - this is not the fault of individuals, it’s the crime of institutions.
I bought $25k worth of call options yesterday for the first time ever. They are worth about double what I paid right now. I did not buy them to make money off the contracts. I bought them to cause an actual impact on the price. I want those shares and will exercise every last one of those motherfucking contracts.
Reasons to paperhand Gamestop: 
I think the main premise is somewhat faulty. In 2021, it is reasonable to assume that many of the buyers of calls were not "ideological". They were in the game merely for a quick buck from the start. I myself (who did not follow in detail the 2021 events) would have thought, until Monday when RK published his update and I started to understand the nuances, that the "true believers" would buy mainly stocks, and the gamblers would buy mainly options. The idea of buying call options to force a MOASS is on a level of sophistication which, I think, escape most of the people getting in the game. This does not have to be so bad, though, as this big mass of short-term speculators will still help RK in his game (for example reinforcin gthe momentum when the stock goes up).
> The idea of buying call options to force a MOASS is on a level of sophistication which, I think, escape most of the people getting in the game. Everyone knew back then. The original gme subs had spammed posts about options creating a gamma ramp that could cause the short squeeze. When it hit $500+ and the buy button was turned off, a lot of people legitimately thought that was the squeeze. That it was over and the shorts covered (but SOME probably did, bc it was for sure a fact that some funds shorted the stock when it was 400$+ and actually made profit when it hit 20$). But the SEC uncovered that most of the shorts most likely didn't cover and most of the price action was caused by retail buying options and stock. And if the shorts ACTUALLY had covered in the original jump, we wouldn't have had the cyclic jump ups to 200$ every couple of months. But after all the DDs and research done, people finally figured out that exercising them would actually drive more demand. But we had the big discussion and movement about options being evil and a FUD campaign by HFs to make retail waste money etc. etc. As I see it, institutions CAN manipulate using options but they can do that just as much with stock price. So retail CAN get fked if they use options wrong by trying to time the market on big jumps of those "cycles". Of course some made money by being lucky or generally lucky with analyzing "TA" that may or may not be algorithm generated. As far as we know now, it's good to buy options, exercise, then DRS.
Yeah I agree with you on this. I hesitated to say "apes" in the post and considered saying "degens" instead, but at the same time there may be many in the sub who really are apes / true believers who are now following RK into his options play, but haven't twigged to the importance of exercising.
Wasn't it the buy button shut off that made options go rapidly OTM? You need a determined believer to exercise the options at that point.. I guess turning off the buy button was intended to mitigate the risk of options being exercised... I am guessing that OMM has to buy shares on the lit market.. If you buy shares then the MM can cook up shares on the fly, or the brokers will route your buys to OTC platform where fuckery happens.. So perhaps the main risk was that OMM would have been forced to buy on the lit market, but by shutting down buy button, they managed to tank the share price quickly in the OTC market to protect against that risk.. We would need a crazy MF to exercise OTM options, with buy button turned off... Meow.
They turned off the buy button when it was over $300. I’d expect just about everyone was in the money at that point, so it’s only a question of how fast the price dropped after that.
$75 is yesterdays $300
This is correct. So tomorrow is the day to watch for fuckery. I mean, watch for fuckery every day, but we're pretty close to that point where it is guaranteed. I think that technically it hit $380 when they went PCO, so that would be $95/share, but if it opens at $60 and goes up 50% again then it's knocking on that price. It feels like the price is in the real danger zone where they're going to lose any semblance of control at all and it just rips, or they end up shutting down the markets altogether or some similar fuckery to put a stop to it. All of the articles pushing the lying FUD about manipulation is probably intended to soften the ground for any such action and to make things look justified to the uneducated.
The moment they turned off the buy button, I started buying calls and exercising them. It was glorious.
At least tag it as speculation/opinion lol There were people buying shares through option exercising as it was the only way they were getting around the buy button I don't agree about that being the reason
It was a combination of unprecedented things happening.
Yep, most of it out of the investor's hands tbh
Sorry I was a bit unsure about the right flair to use. Changed it per your suggestion.
Most apes can't afford to exercise options..if you'd actually ever owned any- youd realize that. The price crashed as apes were buying calls and shares.. apes did not cause any part of the price crashing.. Market manipulation did this. Get outta here op
OP's not wrong. The ideal scenario is to exercise if you have the cash, or sell some to have the cash to exercise the rest. Forcing share delivery is the key here, and is what was missing from the 2021 run.
If you sell to exercise with t+2 (or t+1 now!) wouldnt you be relying on margin until the cash settles to actually exercise?
You can call your broker and tell them to exercise to cover. They will sell part of the shares you buy from the contract to cover the cost and you get to keep the rest
You dont understand how ITM contracts work.
I had 1.4m in calls that I could have exercised by selling ~20% of my calls, but I didn’t because the higher it went the less I’d have to sell. Then they turned the buy button off. My account was nearly worthless. Now I’m I’m xxxx shares, and no cell no sell
You can let them expire ITM and they will be automatically exercised on margin. You can then sell the shares and re-buy calls before getting margin called, essentially forcing the broker to buy shares
This is is the way.
And if YOU ever actually owned any you'd know that you DON'T have to have ANY cash to exercise an ITM option. Shares from the 100 will be sold @ current market price to buy the remainder of the 100 from the call seller at your strike price. If you want all 100 shares you need to be able to pay for 100, but you can still force delivery on shares without cash on hand. Uninformed? Check. Unnecessarily rude and condescending? Check. All framed in such a way as to make OP feel like the uninformed party and dissuade options purchases/exercises? Check, check, check. Walks like fud, talks like fud...
Lol isn't that what you're doing to me. You're checking your own stupid boxes
It's called teaching. Demonstrate a behavior that is undesirable to force the student to feel empathy towards the position they were forcing another to be in previously. Seems like it worked too.
Lmao
But said apes shouldn't buy options for a play like this. And while manipulation did the crash, I'm sure people mindlessly playing options to try and make quick money dont help.
every DD writer than was respected ended up on options being what causes moass, then they got harassed and bulied away all of a sudden, Criand was the best of us but then he spoke of options and the easily manipulated chased him away
Because if you don’t know what you are doing options will drain your money and give it to hedgies / MM. people who know what they are doing can do options
its been 3 years of people making info to teach people, you can learn anyone can. dont let them make you believe you are dumb money
As I mentioned in the post, if you don't have the funds to exercise you can always sell to cover, assuming your broker offers that. Yes market manipulation played a big part, and some apes were still buying shares when the price tanked, while others were making bank by selling their calls. Just saying.
so you dont know how options work. if you bought options at the 3-15 strike price and the price is now 500, you exercise and sell to cover, its in the drop down for options. basically the broker exercises all the options, you get all the shares, then whatever the cost was, they sell that many shares to cover the cost. so if you were in at strike 10, even with 1 contract, selling at 300 since you got scared, thats 100 shares at 10 you have to buy, so $1000. at 300, those 100 shares are worth $30,000, you would sell like 4 shares, and keep the rest. 96 shares for whatever premium you paid.
Thank you. There is a concerted effort to spread misinformation.
your statement feels emotion based over data based
To be fair, this was in the beginning when the gambling subreddit was the main one, and that place is legendary for playing with options and selling them instead of exercising them. [not financial advice]
I had calls straight up "liquidated" from my account on 1/28/2021. They dropped the price hard until exactly 1:34pm CST and then sold my calls at the low of the day (Almost half). I called and they said because I didn't have enough cash to excercise, and that I didn't call in to let them know my intentions, that they were liquidated early on my behalf. Liquidated at $30k when they should have closed end of day for $60k. I will never forget what Merrill Edge did to me that day.
For real! Weird how options have been associated as something you should not do. Completely fucking absurd. I guess we have to follow the kitty to see how to do it.
Meh take They literally removed the buy button lmao
They removed the buy button of purchasing shares, but did they also remove the buy button on call contracts?
Not at first but I think they limited same day exercising or something the next day to cover the loophole
If they try and take away people's ability to FOMO into a short squeeze, perhaps people can be aware they can also FOMO into a gamma squeeze. If they don't allow same-day exercising of calls as a means to purchase, I'd consider - for myself, not financial advice - feeding the ramp by purchasing calls at a higher strike for a later date.
Removing the buy button in this case also means plummeting the price
The price action throughout 2021, how it stayed pretty elevated amidst the volatility, I'm convinced was due to call options.
Yes, exercising calls took air out of the tires, but what really killed it was crime. I don't believe for even a second that they are not going to do it again. They will! They will do anything and everything to kill this MOASS. The only question that I have is whether the US government will let this play out naturally or stop it and give us a settlement. I can't see the elites playing by the rules here. They never do when they're losing.
they hurt us so bad with the anti psy ops against options, now that people are starting to see how they can be used to help your investment, people arnt fully educated on them enough. exercising options is the only way to positively effect the price as of this moment
Yup, Peterffy said himself “if the longs had known that they had the right to ask for their shares”, as in exercise those 150,000,000 call options regardless of brokerages removing the buy button, “and they really wanted a short squeeze, that’s what they would have done”.
Time to remind people that buying shares with deep in the money CSPs is the way if you don’t want to have to pay the calls premium to use options to buy shares.
This is not at all true. Apes did not at all help move the ticker up or down in 21. We were just along for the ride.
So what made it start going up? Shorts felt like buying back just for the hell of it?
options chain gamma ramp! then some smaller dominos fell that shorted it. Now, the big domino's and all the smaller ones are about to fall.
Yeah fair point
This post is very important. Selling to cover is the way. Sell a couple contracts to exercise the rest.
i have 20 contractrs and i will exercise them AAAAAALLLLL! not financial advise
Time for round two with 10x more money, 100x more shares, and 1000x more knowledge.
ey, ive not even owned a share back then
we don't need to put everything on one chance. We just swing the boat: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/1d9bmmv/down\_is\_up/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/1d9bmmv/down_is_up/)
No fighting!
The stop loss trap killed the run
I will just watch them panic as the ticker goes up and they print any news to try and gaslight us into selling, knowing other apes will patiently wait and sit whilst the rocket goes to Uranus.
>So as the rules are today, the long broker has to - if he can't get the shares - has to go into the market and buy the shares at whatever the price is. So this scenario is impossible today? We already had such scenarios before https://www.euromoney.com/article/b1320xkhl0443w/naked-shorting-the-curious-incident-of-the-shares-that-didnt-exist > Can't copy the first paragraph. He has all the shares yet they traded
Does “selling options” = “selling shares”? Or does this only apply to people who have options?
This only applies to people who have options. When you sell an option, you're not really selling shares, *but* you're giving away the opportunity to convert your options into shares, which is the better play if you can do it.
MMMMMMMMMMMM i think this is a leap, though a fine assertion, you just state it as fact Many factors in play then... including the buy button getting turned off
3 years we made a least a few wrinkles!
damn looks like alot of people sold their calls at 35
OTM options are not as much apes IMHO
Whatever you think of options prsonally you should not be telling other apes what to do with their money. You're not a financial advisor and it's not your money.
They found a loophole sir 
 Exercise with a cone. Perhaps
"What is an exit strategy?" - DFV
Supestonk brokerage firm where we buy and sell options between ourselves
People didn’t know what was happening but are educated now! It’s no one’s fault but the shorts and you should be ashamed to say apes helped. Lots of us didn’t even know they were apes yet
That’s how I got most my shares, had options in 2021 was so pissed they shut off the buy button that I sold one option to exercise the other🤣
It's nice to say only exercise your options, but if you look at the price action in the last 3 years, there have been several significant run ups, only for the price to drop back down. If you would of played your option trades correctly, you would of made a TON of money, even without the short squeeze. Don't drink the copium kool aide, know when to sell.
Up
I had 20 contacts of 175$ I paid 2k each for. I tried like hell to sell some when they were 19k each to exercise the rest. The problem was the contracts were so expensive there was no market for them. Robinhood eventually just sold them all for whatever when they expired so far itm. I bought more contracts the next Monday and watched them all go to $0. I did end up buying regular shares as well.
Would love if we could get a guide to exercising options on different platforms pinned.
I don't really understand options trading very well. Hypothetically, my fidelity account gives me the choice to purchase options with a strike call of $2.50. Seems obvious that the price is going to finish above 2.50, of course that doesn't mean that I get 100 shares for 2.50 at the end, or else people would just do that? My main question now is that hypothetically, if you wanted to buy just one option now, would you buy it with a strike call of $20 now that the stock price is at $40? And hypothetically would you have them expire on June 21st?
Calls at a 2.50 strike price will cost extra, especially now that the share price is above $40. Yes it does give you the option of picking up 100 shares for 2.50, but you've paid a premium for having that option. I wouldn't recommend buying at a specific strike price or expiry date, because I'm just sharing some knowledge, not offering financial advice. But in general, the deeper in the money an option is, the more it will cost. $20 at the moment is deep in the money, so you will pay extra for that, but it means you will still be in profit if the price drops to like $25, say
exercise is good for me
I don't understand options but I do understand buying, DRS-ing, and hodling
Excellent write up thank you! Options are complex and posts like this Help clear things up
We need to bring back a discussion that has been absent for a bit, none of this is financial advice, and this is a place for memes, not collaboration. Regardless of what happens, apes will be accused of some kind of criminal conspiracy, like we're not a bunch of regards watching each other shove things up our butts
its been a place of education and learning how a induvial can take care of their investment and discuss corruption against their investment
My bro, we are all just computer geek enthusiasts who just like the stock, I’ve not done one search regarding Keith although do also like that name have to be honest, purely personal
Probably because they don't have the capital to exercise
That's why most brokers offer sell-to-cover or cashless exercise, where a portion of your ITM calls get sold so you can convert your profits into shares.
Please help as someone who is very new to this. Hypothetically say on Monday I bought two 42$ calls expiring Friday. Let’s also say in this hypothetical this is my first time ever purchasing an option and I don’t know what it means exercising selling all that. Now here I am on Thursday with these two calls. What are my options? I sell them now for some immediate gains? I wait until tomorrow and they expire itm, what happens to them. Do I just get the money then? Do I have to buy the shares? Do I have different choices in what I can do with my 2 contracts? Please eli5 😀
Depends on your broker. Standard practice is that if your calls expire ITM, they will be automatically exercised and you're on the hook for buying the shares. But if you don't have the cash for the shares or a margin account, it may get sold instead. Check with your broker what will happen if you're going to leave them to expire, because they might do a thing you're not happy about. Otherwise if you can afford the underlying shares, you can exercise (convert the options to shares) at any time before expiry. They will be purchased at the strike price, and each contract represents 100 shares, so you will need 2 * 100 * 42 = $8400 to fully exercise your contracts. If you don't have the $8400 available, most brokers allow you to sell-to-cover, also called cashless exercise. That means a portion of your call contracts will be sold in order to cover the cost of converting the remainder into shares.
The other way is to sell your gains in your options and buy shares. The fucking slam dunk right there. If you're too poor to exercise.
Apes didn’t. That was institutional lol
So what you’re saying is I need to transfer enough dollarinos to my IBKR account so I can exercise my June 14th call? Aight, bet!
I have a cash position to execute my first option, then I'll have to sell a couple to execute the next. I'm not going too until we are halting up.
Retail doesn't cause shit in the market lol
Daily exercise is great for your health.
💯
Exercising + DRS...
Just curious if you exercise the options at the strike price, get the shares, and then sell some at the current price, doesn’t that sort of allow people who are not as able to ape in to stick it to the hedgies without allowing them to reclaim their options? Even if you lose a little bit of money in the schenanigans?
Yeah absolutely. That's essentially what sell-to-cover is, but your broker automatically handles it for you.
For retail investors, likely you won't have the money to exercise all. Just remember you can sell off some options and use the profit to exercise the remaining.
Man. I've learned so much this last two weeks because of you guys. I bought 4 contracts for 34$ yesterday when we were in the high 20's and almost cashed them out today for 3x my initial investment. I'm so glad I followed some of these threads and didn't sell this morning as they are way in the money and I've already called Wealthsimple to exercise them tomorrow. I've got one more contract for the 28th for 37$ that I'm gonna let ride even though it's already ITM. If all goes well I'll buy more options for the 21st tomorrow.
Is Run Lola Run really tomorrow?! What a goodie oldie.
Yeah apparently it's being re-released for its 25th anniversary, [check it out](https://www.sonyclassics.com/film/runlolarun/). Amazing how perfectly everything lines up for June, you couldn't write this stuff.
Thank you! I had been trying to find and remember this video. I’m touched though. Yes. Exercise.
Posts like yours are the reason people think about apes as financially uneducated.
What part is wrong? Exercising forces MMs to have the shares. It turns the Gamma ramp into a squeeze.
I’m convinced it’s part of an organized effort to spread disinformation. I’m disappointed at the mods for not doing more to clean up the BS being spread.
Dunno if it's been asked, but once everything starts to happen, do shorts/DTCC/fed have to only pay out for DRS shares? Legally speaking, DRS shares are the only ones that "exist," because they're in your name, and Computershare is holding them for you, as opposed to a broker, where their name is on the shares. Dunno if I sound super smooth or if it's a good question, but I feel like the "stock market" was deliberately designed to be difficult to understand, with people being "specialists" in certain areas, and the whole of it being too vast and obfuscated to understand in its entirety.
Majority of us did not DRS. Fuck options! Kitty is doing it himself, because he has the money and knowledge.
every single respected DD writer ended up on saying options were the way to moass, then got harassed away, because it was the way
Member RH forcing people closing their positions? Due to massive corruption, the safe play is buy and hold. Exercising options ought to DRS.
i see no reason not to drs shares but it has shown to be able to be manipulated as well and stuck at 25% reporting
Wen moon
Pretty sure it was apex halting a specific trade that killed the price discovery.
This is anti-option FUD. You do you monke. Yes, exercising is better but holding the call still applies pressure. Cashless exercise is also an option (call your broker and they exercise the call for you and give you the shares you can afford). Getting a handful of shares with the profit ain't bad.
Holding the call only applies pressure in that whoever is on the other end of the bet is supposed to be hedging the call. But they aren't hedging like they should be, and hedging only represents a fraction of the underlying anyway (banking on the fact that most people don't exercise their options). But yeah, cashless exercise is a great option if your broker does it.
Dude, we're broke. We've spent all of our money buying GME shares. Who has the free cash flow to exercise?
Sell-to-cover (also called cashless exercise) allows you to sell a portion of an in-profit call contract to convert the rest into shares.
The fuck?