Yes, it definitely is a full-time job and then some. An incredible amount of time and effort is required for each and every play, especially when deciding to do one like that, and a lot of tough decisions have to be made on the fly when the bullets are flying from every direction.
Many weekends and nights spent just pouring over data - short interest, utilization, cost to borrow, days to cover, charting/fractal pattern analysis, figuring out what institutions own the stock and how they tend to run based on so called potential “catalysts,” etc., and of course, figuring out how you want to divvy up your money into each play and at what strikes. A lot of work, but it pays well.
I am almost exclusively into taking advantage of the heavily-shorted securities’ cyclical nature with aggressive options plays at this stage. So many of them are telegraphed, especially leading into the quarterly rollover periods (the next futures rollover deadline is 03/10, and that’s why this basket of stocks is starting to run right about now).
They have aggressively shorted the SPY over the last two months, using flimsy news like Omicron and now this “war,” all to justify it and get retail consumers that don’t fully have a grasp of the manipulation occurring out, so now all that built up short pressure is starting to get released, in addition to what was already there.
Here is my current list I am in with aggressive positions since early February, based on my analysis of that heavily-shorted security world (I DESPISE the term “meme stocks,” which is meant to make people fear and/or not want to partake in taking advantage of this set of massive institutional errors of shorting over-aggressiveness during the height of the pandemic):
AMC (been in since early last year, with a massive/reckless call position that paid off, swing-trading it with far-dated calls at this point, but it has been very elusive)
ATER
BBIG
BLNK
BKKT
BTBT
GME
OCGN
PHUN
SPCE
TTCF