It will not be easy to put the genie back into the bottle as the Robinhooders, the amateur traders who have devastated Wall Street, become aware of their strength. The market bulletin reports that the long wave of the "fashion" of chasing stocks under the ax of short sellers has arrived in the East. This morning the actions of Top Glove, the largest Malaysian manufacturer of plastic gloves, has achieved a rise of 14% reversing the downward trend that had occurred after the discovery of vaccines. A reaction stimulated by the message sent, via the social network Reddit, by Revevent, one of the site's moderators.
Something similar is happening in Europe: there are not a few stocks, already under the ax of short sellers, which are receiving unexpected attention: Unibail-Rodamco, Klepierre, Nokia, the British publisher Pearson (former owner of the Financial Times before the transfer of the Nikkei to the Japanese), the Polish CD Projekt, video games, but also Casino supermarkets and Europcar car rental. The French site Boursorama is trying to rally the troops of traders from the Old Continent, strong in the appeal of the Française de Jeux, the Sisal from beyond the Alps, which has recently entered the list. But we start from modest levels: in 2020 there were no more than 1,3 million short sellers against the five million who participate in Reddit chats.
The main battlefield remains the USA where the Robinhood site, the epicenter of the challenge, has just announced that it has taken up a billion dollars to bear the brunt of the clash on GameStop. In short, Thursday's break did not indicate a retreat, but a forced move to comply with "the requirements imposed by the SEC, which can fluctuate depending on the volatility of the markets" as Vlad Tenev, one of the two promoters of the platform that acts as guarantor of traders' transactions vis-à-vis the clearinghouse. In confirmation that Tenev, Bulgarian by origin, not even thirty years old, is a counterpart considered reliable, suffice it to say that the consortium that guaranteed the financing is led by JP Morgan and made up of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Barclays and Wells Fargo. In short, all the Big names decided to ride the wave of the Robinhooders which promises, together with failures, the thrill of new earnings. The news of return to the Robinhood arena it has already caused a 44% increase in GameStop, as happened to Blackberry and AMC, the most important cinema chain in America, on the ropes after the closing of the cinemas.
Ma the big target could be silver, which already in the past at the time of the Hunt brothers, the Texan oilmen protagonists of an epic battle over the price lists in the seventies, was at the center of a memorable speculation. On Thursday, silver prices rose by 4% accelerating from +2,5% on Wednesday on the wave of the increase in buyers. It is not excluded that the crowd of traders has targeted silver, a raw material traditionally sold short by the big names on Wall Street. JP Morgan is the first on the list of entities to have open short positions.
