most of my tweets have devolved into snarky subtweets lately so here's something useful.

You really wanna stick it to the suits by buying some heavily shorted shitco? don't buy the stock, buy the synthetic

you see, if you buy some shorted shitco, odds are the borrow rate is quite high. i.e. people are paying you interest to borrow your stock. But for most retail investors, the broker (the suit) captures that and doesn't pay it out to you

only institutions (again, suits) have access to competitive stock borrow operations. But guess what, option market makers also operate here, and they have to buy/short the stock to delta hedge. The net result here is that the borrow is reflected directly in the option prices.

e.g. the puts are more expensive than they should be because the market maker has to short the stock to hedge his short put, and needs to be compensated for the borrow. This is why buying puts on high borrow names is also no free lunch.

this also allows you to be on the other side of this idea though. If you wanna be long the stock, you can short a put and buy a call of the same strike (cash secured pls) and capture the implied borrow. Your broker doesn't get shares to lend out and you capture the full borrow.

this position is identical to a long stock position otherwise

This isn't trivial, borrow rates on GME were extremely high and if you just held a synthetic over 2020 you would've made anywhere from 20 to 100%