If you are an investor in AMC Entertainment Holdings (NYSE: AMC), GameStop (NYSE: GME) or Bed Bath and Beyond (NASDAQ: BBBY), you may have come across what is known as the ‘Stonk-O-Tracker‘.
To the untrained eye, it appears like a confusing set of letters and numbers, akin to Matt Damon’s mirror in Good Will Hunting.
But if you take the time to learn how to use the Stonk-O-Tracker, it can be a great one-stop-shop for monitoring important data relating to AMC, GME and BBBY shares.
What is Stonk-O-Tracker?
Stonk-O-Tracker is an online tool created by an unknown developer who says he “simply likes the stocks.”
It has attracted a lot of attention from so-called ‘meme-stock’ investors on Reddit, Twitter and YouTube, including one who described the tracker as “a fun website, created for apes, by apes”.
Its fairly basic interface presents information on AMC, GME and BBBY (you can toggle between the three, but on the screen capture below, it is set to AMC).
Stonk-O-Tracker AMC
So, if we use AMC as our example, let’s look at the various data that Stonk-O-Tracker presents.
Firstly, you’ll see there’s an orange bar that runs across the page saying “Stonk time in 7hr 19 min 54 sec”. That one is fairly easy to explain – it’s a countdown to when the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) opens!
You’ll also see just below that bar on the left there’s a heading NYSE with a price of $12.78. That is the price of the AMC stock when the New York Stock Exchange closed.
If we move across to our right, we see a heading of ‘SSR’.
What is SSR?
SSR is the acronym for ‘short sale restriction,’ which is also referred to as the ‘alternative uptick rule’.
This rule protects stocks from continuous short-selling, by prohibiting shorts when a stock has dropped by 10% or more from the previous trading day.
So in the case of our screenshot above, the SSR is set at $11.50, which is set 10% below AMC’s NYSE closing price of $12.78.
What is FRA on Stonk-O-Tracker?
Stonk-O-Tracker has a heading ‘FRA’, which represents the price of AMC shares on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.
The FRA is Europe’s largest stock exchange, and the price here is shown in Euros.
Stonk-O-Tracker ‘Calls ITM Expiring’
On Stonk-O-Tracker, there is a section which titled ‘Calls ITM Expiring’. This section shows us how many call options on the AMC stock are expiring “In The Money” on a given date.
Acall option, often known as just a call, gives an investor the ability to buy a share at a set price, on a certain date.
If, when that date arrives, that price is lower than the actual cost of buying that share on the open market, the owner is “in the money” and can pocket the difference.
Below, for example, the Stonk-O-Tracker shows 5,445 calls are expiring “in the money” at $13 on July 8.
To give you a real-life example of how this works, consider someone purchasing one call option of the AMC stock at a price of $20.
If AMC’s stock is at $25 the day before the call option expires, it is in the money by $5.
The purchaser can then exercise the call option and buy the share of AMC for $20 and sell it for $25.
What is Stonk-O-Tracker’s ‘shares available to borrow’?
Stonk-O-Tracker shows AMC, GME and BBBY investors how many shares of the respective companies are available for short sellers to borrow.
These short sellers will aim to borrow the shares from a broker, wait for the share’s price to drop and then sell them back to the broker, pocketing the profit.
When a stock is being heavily shorted, the shares available to borrow will drop.
The below image shows that (at the time of publication) 400,000 AMC shares are available to borrow. However, note that the creator of Stonk-O-Tracker says “the available shares to borrow is an amount provided by Interactive Brokers. It only displays the amount of shares that can be borrowed from them. It’s not the total amount of available shares to borrow but gives a good indication what’s happening. “
The image below also shows how many AMC shares are available to be shorted through the Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) which hold AMC.
What is Stonk-o-tracker’s ‘Free Float Locked’
The Direct Registration System (DRS) allows shareholders to lock up their GME, AMC and BBBY shares without needing a brokerage house behind them. Many shareholders are trying to do this so that the shares are not available to short sellers.
The theory is that if enough GME, AMC and BBBY investors use DRS, it will become a lot more difficult for market makers to drive the stocks’ price down.
Below is a screenshot from Stonk-O-Tracker at the time of publication showing that 45.55% of shares have been locked (a total of 15,406,414), with 18,415,284 left to be locked up via DRS.
What is the ‘tit*-Up-Tracker’?
A recent addition to Stonk-O-Tracker is the amusingly named ‘tit*-Up-Tracker’, which can be accessed via a tab near the top right-hand-corner as seen below:
The ‘tit*-Up-Tracker’ monitors two metrics: ‘Reverse Repurchase Agreements’ (also known as RRP or ‘Reverse Repos’) and the ‘US Daily Treasury Statement’.
The Reverse Repurchase Agreement metric shows the uptake in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Overnight Reverse Repurchase Facility, where it can take excess cash out of the system by lending out securities its has on its balance sheet, before buying it back the next day.
There is a belief among meme stock investors that a high RRP is an indication of systemic stress and a potential economic crash, although Bloomberg questioned that theory in a recent article.
The ‘US Daily Treasury’ statement on the ‘tit*-Up-Tracker’ gives a metric for theUS Treasury’s cash and debt operations for the Federal Government on what’s known as ‘a modified cash basis.’
An example is below:
The ‘tit*-Up-Tracker’ is essentially seen as a way for AMC, GME and BBBY investors to gauge the state of the United States and world economy, with the view the meme stocks could boom in the event of a major crash.
Which data sources does Stonk-O-Tracker use?
The creator of Stonk-O-Tracker says he uses the following sources to feed data into the online tool:
- The SEC
- Yahoo Finance
- Shortvolumes.com
- Interactive brokers
- Market Chameleon
- etfdb.com
- Finra
- ComputerShared.net
How is Stonk-O-Tracker funded?
Whilst the creator of Stonk-O-Tracker says the website doesn’t need to make money, he asks for donations to cover running costs.
“I’m fine for now but if this explodes like the stock itself it could be harder to keep it going,” he says.
Donations can be made via a PayPal donation, with a promise that all donations exceeding the running costs “will go to a charity.” (More details are here).
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