Template:Sjs short squeeze

Herculio: How now, Ser Jez: how fares thy short?
Ser Jaramey: Squeezed.
Unwarily I trod the basest range
And sold there what I borrowed:
A common stock of dismal prospect.
Herculio: A manful punt for so scant a likely gain?
Ser Jaramey: Aye but, I thought, yet safe enough —
That laggard scrip, housed around in bricks and mortar,
Whose hawkery of pre-loved flickish playthings
Casts surer shade across the purgatorial chapter
Than e’er it might upon some distant hea’enly host.
The surest thing was up: its only way was down.
Herculio: Oh? Did it not turn out so?
Ser Jaramey: A noisome band of amateurs did twist its price.
That vapid instrument prescribed a path most inopportune.
Herculio: A sideways move, not down, perchance?
Ser Jaramey: How might I wish!
Nuncle: It went to the moon.
Herculio: How fares thy mark-to-market now?
Ser Jaramey: Sadly low, and presently moist, or damp —
Herculio: “Damp,” you say? I never heard a portfolio get wet!
Nuncle: Yet ever’y other one is under water.
Herculio: Now I catch the drift. How far deep is down?
Ser Jaramey: More fathoms than I can fathom.
And now the one who wrote my swap hath taken ill,
Though he be to the good and I be in the hole.
Herculio: Ill? What malady afflicts a man so thickly profited?
Ser Jaramey: His payments due to other banks
In sum well ’cross the starry Threshold, lie in arrears.
Sans grace or composition; absent a cleansing force majeure
He’s in default. I have him bang to rights.
Herein, my dilemma: Do I close my book, as is my right
And bear the funded pain of outward cashflow —
Or hold my peace, keep powder dry and stay the course
To expiry in earnest hope that, ’twixt now and then
Vicissitude should salt away my losing marks?
The latter course, of course, appeals, save this:
I, by lights of our compact, must pay what is confirm’d
While my oppugnant customer — the very one in breach
Revels in churlish delinquency. It feels unjust.
Herculio: Canst thou not, with merry words
Assuage this awkward detriment?
A simple term, to wit: whilst man defaults
He may not seek performance?
Ser Jaramey: Alas, that lance doth fetch aslant
Upon the voiding sheen of code.
No feint, nor jibe, nor fulsome thrust of cunning covenant
Couldst adjourn our present debt short of its terminance
Such canny phrase wouldst fall away:
A null, a nought, a preference rudely voided.
And thus, our right demis’d. No more
Than had we ne’er inked it in the first place.
Nuncle: Hold that thought. There’s something in ’t yet.
Empty is as empty does, Sirrah. One cannot pick an empty pocket.
What rights a man hath never had cannot be stole.
Ser Jaramey: ’Tis an empty supposition, Fool.
Mere riddles cannot make us whole.
Nuncle: Hold on: if wholly the whole’s a hole
Who’ll hold the whole hole holy?
Ser Jaramey: Holy moly.