Template:Sjs short squeeze

Herculio: How now, Ser Jez: how fares thy short?
Ser Jaramey: Squeezèd.
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.
Forsooth, 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 perchance?
Ser Jaramey: How might I wish!
Nuncle: It went to the moon.
Ser Jaramey: Th’ eternal roiling gears, as if by unseen hand
Propel the market’s ebb and pop
But gripp’d anew by retail flippancy
The Gods lampoon’d my tightly-modelled globe
And abruptly did my traded prospects drop.
Nuncle: When the GameStop stops, stop.
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 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 law.
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.
Herculio: I have a thought. This meagre tract: not ninety words
Wrapp’d about with preliminal nicety and
Stamp’d as for affixation to a servic’d boiler —
Conceals a clever trick.
Ser Jaramey: What kind of onion’d witchery is this?
Nuncle: Who soaps an assignee with unfreighted tropes of conjury
Tricks only his frail self-examinership.
Herculio: Hear me, though. This rider taps a stranger science Than thy sequestrator’s astrology.
Should constellations, ill-aligned, by morbid glint
Throw misadventure upon one side — call him, “A”
Whilst upon the other — that one, “B” — by present value judg’d
Calumny befalls his pretty box of bets —
Nuncle: As long in extant tenor as they are short of market nous.
Herculio: Thus poor Party B confronts a cleffèd stick:
Close-out apace, but fund afull his bishèd speculation —
Or stay in play, pray the stars parlay his losing stake
But meantime pay away what’s due sans hope of reciprocation?
Ser Jaramey: No more or less, Herculio: that is my dilemma.
Herculio: Then this nifty rider sees you right.
It purporteth not suspension nor egregious snatch of weakling’s rights —
Nor any term alike that’s imperilled by a bust.
The charmèd scheme is this:
Thine payment “stopped” did not but start:
’Twas ne’er there to set aside.
Salt tears, o’er un-spilt milk, are seldom cried
One cannot abrogate that which, by careful shape of precedentery, was never yet applied.
Nuncle: Less an asset flawed than an assetted flaw.
Ser Jaramey: But where’s the thread
By which this cunning trap is sprung?
Nuncle: Aye, there’s the jape. The tripwire lies unstrung.