Jun. 26 at 11:20 AM
$GRPN
Good morning
Good morning to the new arrivals on the board on the long side, short side, and the longtime groupies who’ve been here from the beginning. Yesterday was a great day, and a day like that naturally brings heightened interest and fresh eyes from both sides of the trade.
The setup hasn’t changed
The premise of the story is intact:
• Revenues are stabilizing around a native-AI turnaround
• A company buyback is in place
• Multiple gamma walls and dealer hedging dynamics are stacked above us
• Over 60% of the float is short into an upward trend
That last point is the one shorts can’t wish away.
Addressing the skepticism
I understand the skepticism. We’ve all seen it: volume rushes in, the stock instantly fades, and the move dies. Sometimes those are clean gamma squeezes that run from
$45 to over a 1000 and a structural re-rate shifts in demand or pricing and never come back. Sometimes they’re one or two-day or week wonders. But the situations most of you are thinking of - the ones that burn people the PND S-1 shelf, algo-driven volume-gathering raises where the company uses the spike to print stock.
You can protect yourself from those almost every time by reading the S-1 / S-3 / 10-Q language: look for active ATMs, shelf takedowns, debt conversions, toxic notes, warrant overhangs. That is not the situation here. The capital structure does not have those landmines.
What today and tomorrow may look like.
This may pull back a dollar or two today or tomorrow. That’s fine and that’s perfectly healthy. A short-term cooldown actually increases pressure on the short side over the medium term, because it lets options dealers decompress some of the hedges they were forced to add, which gives shorts a brief window of relief. But “brief” is the operative word.
Why the math still favors patience because the math is just the math.
When you net it out:
• Institutional holders aren’t selling
• The buyback is removing float, not adding it
• Company-side stabilization removes the fundamental short thesis
• There simply are not enough real, borrowable, deliverable shares for the short side to cover into
This is a timing game now, not a thesis game. The shorts can’t get out. We can give them a day or two of relief, but the exit door hasn’t gotten any wider — and every day the float tightens, it gets narrower.
Bottom line
Patience makes capital. Panic makes people rewrite their thesis at the wrong price.
Stay disciplined.
