One week ago, the Reddit crowd - then numbering 2 million users- sparked a historic squeeze among the most shorted Russell 3000 stocks (led by Gamestop) which inflicted hundreds of billions of losses on some hedge funds (while making other hedge funds that much richer), and launched a deleveraging VaR shockwave which forced even non-shorting hedge funds to unwind some of their biggest (and most popular) positions.

Then, this Monday, the same Reddit crowd - now having tripled to 7.5 million users - managed to spark the biggest surge in silver prices since the collapse of Lehman, and even though there were not nearly as many shorts here, the move was sizable enough to unleash another major VaR shockwave across markets, and forcing even unlinked assets to selloff amid another degrossing wave.

What the two episodes had in common is that any outlier event - and last week's "most shorted vs most popular" slamdown was a 7 sigma event, which nobody had anticipated, with Goldman writing that Tuesday "was the worst day for GS HF VIP longs vs GS Most Short in our records (-7.7%)"...