Even in the highest echelons of finance, mistakes happen all the time.
Someone fat-fingers a keystroke and few zeroes get added to a buy or sell order, or a trading-floor intern drops coffee on a disgruntled VP who calls for a move on the wrong stock, or a bank executive goes to a picnic with a mysterious client on his private Caribbean island, or that one time Standard Poor downgraded France the country.
But if you are Fidelity Investments and you have spent much of 2021 pulling in a steady stream of retail investors thanks in large part to Robinhood's HOOD, January buttfumble that resulted in trading restrictions on popular names at the height of meme-stock short, the last thing you want to do is give retail Apes a reason to lose trust in you.
It is pretty cringey to see that a growing band of retail Apes spent much of Tuesday morning ignoring the macro bloodbath across indexes and combing through what they thought looked like a fishy discrepancy on Fidelity's platform, regarding GameStop GME.
Hamberere, a user on GameStop, posted a screenshot of their Fidelity account, showing 13,767, 545 shares available to short late Tuesday morning.
This was a shockingly high number of available shares, and well over 2 million available on Monday night, for pro-GME Apes who have spent 10 months trying to keep short sellers from getting their hands on GameStop shares, and going so far as to transfer their accounts to Fidelity and even direct-register them to keep them locked away.
Reddit was flooded with users speculating that the shares they attempted to DRS were being lent out by Fidelity, or that some big hedge fund had covered its short position, which is a hard one to buy considering the stock is down over 19% in the past five days.
The company's early attempts did not calm nerves, with a midday response to angry customers on Reddit explaining how Fidelity computes shares available, something most Reddit Apes are intimately aware of by now.
A clarification was available by the afternoon.
Our trade ticket reflected an error in the number of GME shares available to short on Friday. Read a post on Fidelity's own subreddit, posted just after 3: 30 p.m. Eastern. After researching the volume with our lending services team, we were able to determine the root cause was an incorrect entry of the number of shares available to short by one of our external counterparties. The issue was fixed at 12: 10 pm ET today. The GME shares available to short is correct on the trade ticket. The most important concern for retail folks was clarified by the company.
We can confirm that the number of shares borrowed never exceeded the actual amount that was available. While that explanation was more fulsome, it did not go over great.
One post has already provided a clue as to what sort of speculation will dominate on Wednesday, and wet Dirt Kurt was not alone in making it clear that social media will almost certainly be filled with some internet sleuthing to find the external counterparty at fault for the error.
Photo of Fidelity Intern In Charge of Data Entry, blared on post on r Superstonk and accompanied by a headshot of Citadel founder Ape archenemey Ken Griffin, photoshopped with a curly mustache.
Reddiit is already buzzing with an campaign to keep their GME shares out of the hands of anyone looking to borrow and short them, despite the fact that there is an emboldened campaign by Apes to keep their GME shares out of the hands of anyone looking to borrow and short them.
That campaign got a boost on Tuesday afternoon, and Fidelity ended up with a hole in its dadcore-reputation armor.
Wednesday should be interesting for everyone involved.