Algohack

Everyone who keeps sharing these short interest charts is missing the flows behind them. Most shops are not taking outright short bets. This is another effort to ease margin requirements across the street: banks providing balance sheet for more speculative bets are asking clients to post more short exposure. The sequence on the street looks like this: HF manager: “I want more margin.” Bank: “Things look risky in public AI bets, and we’re already lending a lot against private AI bets. For some clients, we’ll extend more financing, but only if they add more short exposure to improve their collateral scores.” HF manager: “Okay, I’ll short more stock against my main bet.” That is how you end up with short exposures that look astronomically high while many end users remain heavily long tech. The additional shorts are supporting the financing of their main bets. Which also tells the bigger story on why raw equity financing rates haven’t blown out the way they did ahead of the big SpaceX IPO in June, despite the fact that lending is slowing.

I’ve seen this quite a bit as well. One of the easiest ways to identify someone who lacks real market experience is to listen to the narratives they construct around the market-making community. It’s a huge red flag whenever someone speaks about market makers as though they’re some divine hand from the sky that sees all, knows all, and controls every movement in the market. More often than not, these narratives serve as convenient scapegoats for price action that someone doesn’t fully understand. And when you actually tap the Street, examine positioning, or dig into the underlying data to validate those claims, they frequently fall apart. The irony is that market makers are often just as constrained by inventory, risk limits, adverse selection, and imperfect information as everyone else. They are not omniscient, nor are they some coordinated entity operating with a singular objective. Ultimately the “market makers are pinning the gamma bro” type of arguments are similar to the statements you hear from a fish blaming the dealer at the casino for “bad luck” on a few hands.