Exactly, but sometimes they don’t have organic traffic to cover the buy/sell orders.

In these cases, they just go short the shares ppl buy and later cover from the market or internal traffic.

By law, they must deliver shares within the bid/ask of the market, which protects retail.

Basically, your broker puts in your order for 100 shares of Gme.

Then, instead of going into an illiquid market, the MM just shorts 100 shares and delivers them to the broker so they are now in your account.

Since the MM doesn’t actually go to the market, large orders won’t move the price.

In theory, this is very good for retail.

MMs make a profit bc they quickly look for shares and cover the 100 shares short for Gme. They take the spread between what you buy the shares at and what they can eventually find them on the market for.

Bc this process is very good for end users, the SEC has given all kinds of special exceptions to MMs who help the system function.

The problem comes in when the MMs cannot actually find real shares in the market….and they are already short in order to deliver shares to the broker.

This has lead to a crazy tap dance where various institutions try to get out of their Gme holdings but cannot.

A lot of the burden is in MMs since they do not have to cover the way that other players do…however, it is a heavy bag that they are holding that eats into their profits.

Eventually, MMs will close and Gme will moon so hard.

They cannot. It is too big. Big tech is getting railed in earning, they don’t have the firepower.