The following is an excerpt from the piece.

Mike McCaskill endlessly studied GameStop. He learned about its fundamentals. What he saw wasn’t a company trying to die. He saw a company with real fight in it to live. And he believed that there was a trade to make. A big one. “I knew that one day this would explode,” he says.

He started buying 1,000 call option contracts on GameStop every week, which meant that he was willing to pay a small premium on each contract in exchange for the right to buy the shares at the current prices if the stock price managed to go up within the week. “The contracts were maybe five, 10 cents. And I’d buy an assload of them,” he says. “And they would expire worthless every time, because the shorts sat on that stock. No matter what happened, it didn’t matter. They were defending that like it didn’t matter. And I lost my ass on calls, over and over.”

McCaskill wondered why the hedge funds that had shorted the stock weren’t covering their shorts. Surely, he thought, they would buy back the stock when it was below $4 and return it to wherever they borrowed it from. At some point, the shorts would have to cover. And when they did, the demand for the stock would tick the price back up. But it never happened. And then it occurred to McCaskill—the funds weren’t ever going to cover their short positions, because they couldn’t. They were trapped in what he calls “an irreversible trade.” Unless GameStop issued new shares, those who shorted the stock were running out of places to buy shares that they hadn’t already bought and sold. “They made it to where there are no real shares,” McCaskill says. “They were betting that this was going bankrupt and that it would never survive. And it was an interesting bet, but it was wrong.”

As McCaskill continued to lose money trying to time his options to an uptick that never came, he touted the stock to all of his friends and family once again. He convinced his uncle Ken, who was at this point had retired from UPS, to invest. “He’s always teased me because I’m pretty much still holding a significant share in UPS,” Hayden says. “He says, ‘You can’t make money on that old bear.’” But Hayden trusted McCaskill. He remembered the money they had made in SOLI. And he knew how hard McCaskill worked. “The guy gets up at 3 in the morning, way before most people, and he’s online most of the day,” Hayden says. “He’s not a goofball. He knows his shit.” Hayden bought about 6,000 shares.

McCaskill’s brother took more convincing. “I’m pretty risk-averse most of the time. I don’t really try to play these things,” Delling says. “He was always chasing the white whale. I’ve always told him, ‘Mike, you’ve been Captain Ahab for a long time. It’s time to stop chasing the white whale.’” McCaskill really did seem to think GameStop was his white whale. And he would suffer like Ahab in pursuit of it. At that time, he believed it might triple or quadruple in value, so he invested in options that would pay him off exponentially higher rates of return. “To me, you’ve got to time this short squeeze because this thing could go to $50 and rip somebody’s head off,” he says.

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