How Convenient!

#GME #AMC The DOJ Announces about an ongoing investigation into Short Selling and an off-site document storage facility burns outside of Chicago,IL

Guess Who’s the Facility Connected to? TD Ameritrade… and a lot of their records were stored at that Facility.

Yup Coincidence pic.twitter.com/2x8gDdxi00

— Nazeem Elkommos (@NazeemElkommos) February 4, 2022

Not generally a conspiracy theorist, but the SEC investigation of short selling is real, and the fire is real and completely destroyed a secure storage facility which held TD Ameritrade documents, and the fire was so intense that the fire department could do nothing but watch.

Given that naked shorting is both illegal and endemic, it seems to me that a lot of people are sleeping better tonight following the mass incineration of these documents.

If you don't understand short selling, it's supposed to work like this:

1. Borrow a stock from someone with the agreement to get it back to them later.  (Pay a fee)
2. Sell the stock to someone else.
3. If the price drops in the time between when you borrowed the stock and when you return it, you pocket the difference. (Profit)

This is all completely legal.  What is not legal is naked shorting, where you skip step one:

1. Sell stock to someone else. (Since you are selling something you do not own, this is fraud)
   
2. Buy the stock some time later
3. If the price drops, you pocket the difference. (Profit)

Not only is step 1 of naked shorting fraud, but it can also be used to push a stock's price lower, driving the profit higher in step 3.

It's illegal as hell, but since no one ever gets investigated for it, a lot of it goes on.  

So the fire does seem to be AWFULLY convenient.