MSTR
May returnStrategy · Bitcoin treasury · $55.64B
A software company that became a leveraged bitcoin holding vehicle.
The short case
Published positions, quoted as they were argued.
Jim ChanosMay returnUnwound November 2025The short seller who called Enron. Ran Kynikos Associates, now Chanos & Company, and tends to short a structure rather than a story.
Short the stock against long bitcoin, betting the premium to net asset value would close. Closed at an mNAV under 1.25x, and he has since signalled interest in putting it back on.
Read the source
Short interest & squeeze model
Short interest
FINRA settlement dataAs of 2026-08-14. Fetched 3 Sept 2026, 22:37 UTC.
$4.62B of stock has been borrowed and sold, and has to be bought back. That is the position at today’s price. Everything below is context for it.
- Shares short
- 31.88M
- % of float
- 8.77%
- % of shares out
- 8.30%
- Days to cover
- 2.05
as reported
- Float
- 363.66M
- Shares out
- 384.23M
- Avg daily volume
- 23.58M
- Institutional own.
- 57.78%
shares, not dollars
shares, not dollars
stockanalysis-history-3mo
Funds & institutional holders
SEC 13F putsNamed funds disclosing a PUT position against this ticker in their most recent SEC 13F-HR filings, matched on CUSIP rather than issuer name (a multi-filer filing can carry an unrelated company's name over the right CUSIP) and attributed to the filer named in that filing's own primary document. This is a quarterly snapshot filed up to 45 days late, so the position may already be gone. A put can be a hedge on a long position, not a directional bearish bet. And 13F excludes short stock outright, which is how most short interest is actually expressed, so this is a small, self-selected slice of the bearish side shown alongside the aggregate short interest above, never an explanation of it. Absence from this list is not evidence a fund is not short.
| Fund | Underlying shares | Value | Period ending | Filing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Galaxy Group Investments LLC | 220.0K | $63.4M | 2025-03-31 | 13F filing |
Call holders
for reference, not the short story| Fund | Underlying shares | Value | Period ending | Filing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unique Wealth Strategies, LLC | 2.0K | $337.2K | 2024-09-30 | 13F filing |
Scanned 20 of the most recent 13F-HR filings mentioning this ticker (cap 20), filed between 2026-02-15 and 2026-09-03. Fetched 3 Sept 2026, 22:37 UTC.
What a squeeze costs
Model, not a predictionA size check, not a forecast: how much net buying it would plausibly take to move the price by a given amount, using the square-root market-impact law ΔP/P = Y·σ·√(Q/ADV) (Almgren et al. 2005; consistent with Kyle's lambda). Y = 1 here, a commonly-cited value for the impact coefficient, exposed as a named constant rather than baked in. σ is trailing daily volatility over the last 65 trading days; ADV is average daily volume. None of this knows anything about actual short entry prices, margin calls, or borrow availability. It is a mechanical answer to "how big a trade moves this how far", nothing more.
- +25%
- $69.30B
- +50%
- $277.20B
- +100%
- $1.11T
- +200%
- $4.44T
beyond the model’s range: asks for 479M shares, more than exist
beyond the model’s range: asks for 1914M shares, more than exist
beyond the model’s range: asks for 7657M shares, more than exist
beyond the model’s range: asks for 30626M shares, more than exist
The square-root law is fitted to trades that are a fraction of one day’s volume. Extrapolated to the larger moves above it asks for more shares than have ever been issued, which is arithmetic rather than a market outcome. Those targets are marked, and should be read as “further than this model can see” rather than as a price.
- Squeeze trigger (20% move)
- $44.35B
- Cover-cascade target
- $154.16
- Days of full volume
- 17.5
capital assumed to put the average short meaningfully underwater, a stated assumption rather than an observed cost basis
if the entire short position ($4.62B) had to cover at once, modelled as +6.5%
trigger capital ÷ average daily dollar volume, i.e. how many days of the entire market's volume that is
Options & gamma exposure
Options & gamma exposure
CBOE, delayedFeed quote time 2026-09-03 22:36:24. This is delayed data, not a live tape. Cached 3 Sept 2026, 22:37 UTC. Spot used for these figures: $143.01.
Gamma exposure is an intraday, mechanical hedging flow: how many shares a delta-hedged options book would need to trade for a 1% move in the underlying, computed from today's open interest and the venue's own per-contract greeks (no Black-Scholes re-derivation here). It is a different mechanism from the short-interest days-to-cover model above, which plays out over days on a figure that only updates a couple of times a month. Treat these as two separate stories, not one combined "squeeze" number.
Every "net" figure below assumes dealers are net short the calls and net long the puts their customers hold. That is a common convention (SqueezeMetrics' GEX methodology; the assumption most retail options-flow trackers use), which makes call gamma an accelerant on the way up (+1) and put gamma an offsetting term (-1). This is an assumption about who is on the other side of the open interest, not a disclosure. Nobody publishes actual dealer books. The raw, unsigned call and put totals are shown alongside the net figure so a reader who rejects the assumption still has usable numbers. Open interest also names nobody: unlike the 13F table above, options data cannot show who wrote a contract at all (13F itself never covers short stock either, see the caveats on that table).
- Call gamma / 1%
- 1.55M sh
- Put gamma / 1%
- 409.2K sh
- Net gamma / 1%
- 1.14M sh
- Call gamma vs ADV
- 6.56%
$221.2M
$58.5M
$162.7M, assumed sign convention
call gamma/1% ÷ average daily volume
- Call open interest
- 1.53M
- Put open interest
- 1.20M
- Put / call ratio
- 0.78
- Chain size
- 3444 contracts
19 expiries
Where the gamma sits
Model, not a predictionStrikes above spot carrying the most call gamma. These are the levels where dealer hedging, under the assumption above, would plausibly accelerate a move on the way up.
- $150.00
- 115.6K sh/1%
- $145.00
- 65.1K sh/1%
- $200.00
- 47.8K sh/1%
- $160.00
- 40.8K sh/1%
- $146.00
- 39.6K sh/1%
Gamma-flip strike: $130.00
The strike where cumulative net gamma (summed from the lowest strike up, under the same sign convention) crosses zero, if the chain has one. This is a fragile marker, not a level: it depends on every assumption above, moves with which strikes and expiries happen to sit in the chain, and can shift meaningfully between one feed pull and the next on thin or stale quotes near the crossing. Read it as a rough boundary, not a price target.
How the pair is supposed to work
🚀
The token runs
A meme paired to the stock catches a bid and brings people with it.
🔗
The arb passes it on
The tokenized share is arbitraged against the listed one, so the buying lands there.
📈
MSTR follows
The smaller the company, the further the same money pushes the price.
🩸
Shorts feel it
A crowded short gets more expensive to hold the higher it goes.
Steps one and two are the parts anyone here controls. Steps three and four are the bet. A meme token has no claim on the stock, the two prices can drift apart for as long as they like, and a short position can stay open longer than a group chat stays interested.