VectoIQ Acquisition (VTIQ) was the HTB (hard-to-borrow) du jour, doing 152,000 trades and $1.34BB in volume … I paid 9.97 cents ($997 per 10,000) per share for the borrow … this stock was in the $30s (up from $15 five days ago, hee hee) and was very difficult in the morning as it kept on flagging and moving higher, frustrating the early shorts (don’t worry, they were just “dabbling,” with “starter size,” taking mere “paper cuts”) … it finally broke after 11 AM following a frenzied push above $35 (watch the tape below closely at that time … pause it, rewind, you know the drill), and gave me a spot to get short. I traded it after-hours as well, which messed up my averages, but my main entry was above $34, which was nice.

There was a bunch of stuff in play today: SIF, MARK (day two), CREX, CODX, etc. Just a wild amount of action if you’re a day trader … I guess the broad market was down, but HTB land is its own universe and I don’t think the tailwind or headwind from the broad tone makes much of a difference. I also traded CYCC (5.53 cent borrow) and made a hash of it, scalping around long with hotkeys and just producing a lot of paperwork while missing the big move down, bah. I caught SIF pretty well, not perfectly, but not badly either ... then got crap after-hours covers on the majority.

I did not open IB and therefore could not harm myself by shorting various ETBs (easy-to-borrow), which is usually my undoing as I lose thousands of dollars, not in borrow fees, like usual, but in bad trades, where I’m tricked, trapped, and top-ticked out — and of course pay an insane amount of commissions at $0.005 a share. As long as I focus my energies on HTB land via the brookie, good things happen. Until tomorrow, fellow pikers!