Let me summarize for others - buy pressure is internalized all day long suppressing positive price action, while sells hit the lit exchange all day long, making it easy to artificially drive the price down. Buys are then satisfied via dark pool block trades after hours with minimal impact on the price.
In addition, thousands of shares sold but not yet purchased accumulate as daily fails to deliver, to be delivered by a certain later date, but can be satisfied by purchasing far out of the money call contracts and selling far out of the money puts and marking those synthetic longs as actual shares on paper.
Interestingly, the FTD data from October is now late by more than 2 weeks for some undisclosed reason. And given the upcoming holidays, FTDs will likely qualify for a deferral period to be covered at a later date, also undisclosed publicly.
If fails to deliver accumulate by a certain amount over a certain time period and are not satisfied in a timely matter, the equity is then placed on the regulation threshold list at which point it cannot “legally” be sold short. GME has not been on the RegSHO threshold list since before the 2021 gamma squeeze. Instead, the ETF with the largest holding of GME shares by percentage, XRT, has been perpetually on the RegSHO threshold list, because the ETF is being pillaged for its GME shares which are then used to further short and drive down the price of GME.
Typically, over 1 million GME shares are borrowed daily and used to short the stock, but curiously they are always somehow returned before the end of the day, keeping the borrow rate low.
Rinse and repeat all of the above and here’s the last 6 months of GameStop price action. Note that in this time period GameStop beat earnings estimates by 79% and reduced losses by 97% year over year. [(see link for graphic)]