This is how cutthroat Wall Street is.

This is how cutthroat Wall Street is. Two hedge funds bought over 100% of a company's stock. Now every short seller on the other side of the trade is trapped. So there's this car rental company called Avis. You probably heard of them. You might have even rented from them. The thing is, Avis isn't in great shape. It's a functioning company, sure, but sales have been declining. It's losing money and it's sitting on $28 billion of debt. On paper, this looked like a terrible company to invest in and a great company to bet against. So short sellers started piling in. These are people who borrow shares and sell them in hopes that they can buy them back at a cheaper price. They make money when the stock goes down. By mid-March, about half of all tradable Avis shares were sold short, an enormous amount. But there was one thing the short sellers didn't pay enough attention to. A hedge fund called SRS Investment Management, run by a guy named Karthik Sarma, had been sitting on around half of all Avis shares for years. Sarma is on the company's board and he's a true believer in the stock. His fund wasn't selling. Then in March, another hedge fund walked in. Pentwater Capital Management looked at this situation and saw a massive opportunity to squeeze the short sellers. One fund already owned half the company and the number of shares sold short was through the roof. If someone came in and bought a massive chunk of what was left, the shorts would be toast. So that's exactly what Pentwater did. They started buying aggressively and by the end of March, Pentwater controlled almost half of the company. Now this is where the math gets absurd. Between SRS and Pentwater, when you add up the shares they own directly and the additional exposure they have through contracts with banks, they control about 108% of Avis stock. 108%, as in 108%. As in more than all of it. Now you might be wondering how anyone can own more than 100% of something. Well, it's because of the short sellers themselves. You see, when you short a stock, you borrow a share from someone who owns it and sell it to someone else. After that, two people effectively own the same share. The original buyer who lent it out and the new buyer who bought it from you. That's how total ownership can exceed 100%. Now SRS and Pentwater don't literally own every share. Other investors like index funds and individual traders own some too. But they own so much that the supply of available shares has become extremely tight. And here's why that's a nightmare scenario for the short sellers. Remember, they borrowed shares and eventually have to return them. The only way to return them is to go into the market and buy shares. But if two funds control the vast majority of available stock, the shorts are essentially forced to buy from them. And they can charge extremely high prices for those shares. So that's exactly what's happening. The stock went from around $100 to almost $600 in a month. Short sellers have racked up billions of dollars in losses. And here's what's wild, they're not giving up. The short sellers are actually doubling down. Now 58% of all shares are short, which is even higher than what it was before the squeeze began. Now these might not be the same shorts that got crushed on the way up. It's probably new short sellers who think that Avis at $500 or $600 per share has to come back down to earth eventually. And based on the fundamentals, they're probably right. Avis at five or six hundred dollars per share is completely disconnected from the underlying business. So the short sellers are basically betting that this can't last forever. They might be thinking SRS and Pentwater are professional money managers. At some point, it makes sense for them to sell and lock in their enormous profits. On top of that, Avis, the company itself, could issue new shares at any time to cash in on the inflated price. Either of those things would release supply back into the market and the stock would crash. But of course, the classic problem with that logic is that the market can stay irrational longer than the shorts can stay solvent. It's kind of like the GameStop situation from a few years ago. Only difference is that was a band of individual investors on Reddit going up against hedge funds, while this is a case of two hedge funds crushing other hedge funds. So we'll see what happens. Right now, it's a standoff. The two hedge funds own over 100% of Avis's stock and short sellers are doubling down against them. Will SRS, Pentwater, or Avis start selling and end the squeeze? Or will the short sellers get crushed even further? What do you guys think's gonna happen? Let me know in the comments and follow for more investing insights.