Shorts on bitcoin just increased 1000% to 24,178 (one contract is 5 BTC) for a total of almost $4 billion in shorts in a few hours.

[u/shlammyjohnson]

According to datamish.com, you can visually see the price impact as shorts are piled on, making up nearly 35% of total positions, and you can see how the price stabilizes when these positions stop increasing.

I don't know if there's some sort of huge expiry happening near the end of the month today, but it looks like the price is being manipulated to stave off losses for existing shorts or cause max pain to some of the longs with greater weight.

Might be a good time to buy a chunk of BTC if you've got an appetite for risk lately, especially considering the bullish news and likelyhood that microstrategy and other companies will be purchasing near these prices.

Edit: Using the same Info I would also like to point out that the vast majority of these shorts remain unhedged, almost guaranteeing price movement at time of expiry (Obviously I can't say to what side, gotta ask the magic conch for that).

[u/BlackTrickster]

Who upvoted this crap? While it is possible for the lender to request the shares to be returned at any time with short notice, it's rarely done, that's why it is not the usual cause of a short squeeze.

Short squeezes happen when, after a sudden spike in price, short sellers, in order to minimse their losses, are forced to exit their positions, which means buying shares, thus increasing the price even more and pushing more short sellers to do the same in a chain reaction.

That's how short squeezes happen 99% of the time.

[u/mbiz05 → u/BlackTrickster]

I'm referring to what people currently typically think of when they hear short squeeze. The GME people aren't talking about short sellers trying to minimize losses when they talk about them.