In response to – https://redd.it/1qygdtt
To me 'Meme Status' is that a stock price is completely untethered from reality. Large / Institutional money is not making the case that gold is due for a larger correction or that it is a meme.
I agree the price of gold seems outlandish but there isn't much appetite for institutional money to short it. Yes, mining stocks themselves have lower short interests than many ETFs but even 3X leveraged GDXU* has a short interest of 8% which is about the same at Nvidia.
Gold might not be the best place to put your money but there are plenty of places that are worse and no, not a meme.
I think short interest is useful and often over looked.
From the Journal Of Financial Economics "We show that short interest is arguably the strongest known predictor of aggregate stock returns."
*225 shares
(Note: Used Perplexity to collect short interest on ten largest gold mining stocks [spot checked 3 of them] and then to average the results. P.S. Fuck SoFi, maybe inclusion is going to be the only thing to save me from taking a serious hair cut. And fuck Amazon.)
Gold is not being shorted like a 'Meme Stock'. Even at these lofty prices the Short Interest for the ten largest gold mining stocks is 1-3%. Lower than darlings like Sofi (8%) / Applied Digital (40%) / QQQ (6%) and yes, GME (16%). Institutional money is not betting against the price of gold.
byu/HaddonH inStockMarket
Posted by HaddonH
5 Comments
1-3% sounds like regulatory requirement + noise.
I’m mostly in gold rn. No way is Trump going to do anything but run this country into the ground for another three years.
Good point—short interest is actually a real market signal, not sentiment. Gold’s 1-3% short ratio across majors suggests institutional conviction, not speculation. If you’re evaluating whether gold is extended, look at real money flows and central bank positioning instead of meme metrics. I track $AMZN’s correlation to commodities here to understand the macro picture better: [$AMZN](https://aimytrade.io/ticker/AMZN?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=comment&utm_campaign=StockMarket&utm_term=AMZN&utm_content=variant_1770617772512_7dosiv)
The fact that gold went up a lot does not mean it’s meme stock. It’s a hedge against fiat currency and inflation. To be honest I don’t care whether gold is shorted. I am long gold and bought some late last year and will hold it for a long time.
“Meme stocks” were aptly named by Wall Street through MSM because they are the most heavily manipulated stocks (by Wall Street) and they don’t want anyone to take those stocks seriously
Are you not bothering to count futures market?
The week ending February 6, 2026, the number of managed money short positions in COMEX Gold Futures stood at 26,864 contracts.
This indicates a 6.76% increase in short positions compared to the previous week and a 55.01% increase from one year ago, suggesting a rise in bearish sentiment among speculative traders.
Total Open Interest: Approximately 280,347 contracts.