Between Neroden's comments and Curt's, it's becoming more and more apparent that the huge (650,000+) buying in the final minute of trading on Friday was probably related to market makers or someone protecting 260-strike options they sold, rather than shorts covering at end of day. I've seen what appears to be be shorts covering at end of busy manipulation days (when we see the effects on the daily chart) to the tune of upwards to 200,000 shares in the final minute, but never 650k+. Shorts are careful to stop the covering (buying) during that final minute so that the SP remains constant, and we clearly didn't see such restraint on Friday because of the $2 move in the final minute.
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Here's a new trading story to consider, given some big move by someone other than shorts at end of day. TSLA bottomed out about 2pm and with the tell-tale icicles and with 58.5% of TSLA selling attributed to shorts by FINRA data (always a higher number than reality, btw), shorts certainly had their hand in the over-the-top descent into the mid 250s. After 2pm, we see a recovery which was likely a combination of longs buying the sale price (you heard many on this thread doing so yesterday) and the market makers or others maneuvering in consideration of their expiring options that day starting to buy in. Lo and behold, the shorts doubled-down and started capping just above 258 (notice the near-horizontal trading going into close), which required more extreme measures. With either market makers balancing or sellers of options manipulating, you would see sufficient selling by shorts between 3:30pm and 4:00pm to counterbalance the buying by MMs or sellers of expiring options.
Of the market makers balancing their holdings theory vs. a big seller of options shooting to move the SP to 260 theory, I lean towards the latter, and here's why. If it was just market makers balancing their holdings, the selling could have been spread out during the final half hour of trading so that all is in balance at day's end and no final-minute buying spree of 650K+ shares would have been needed. Instead, we saw a huge quantity of selling and a price spike up to EXACTLY 260.00. For this reason, I am going with someone protecting 260 strike options they sold (probably sold both puts and calls and would make out like bandits if SP closed at exactly 260, which it did.
In a very real sense, the short manipulators yesterday stood in the way of a much more powerful manipulator yesterday, and the big dog prevailed in the final minute with shear brute force.
Looked at from the short's viewpoint, Friday was a mess. The daily chart shows a big drop by 2:00pm, which was great as far as the shorts were concerned, but buying by longs and market makers or option sellers in the afternoon started eroding the gains of the shorts quickly, and so a cap was needed near 258 to stop the recovery. Shorts must have been doing some serious short-selling to keep the cap intact, and in the final minute, to their utter chagrin, hundreds of thousands of shares of buying popped up, which not only made much of their selling on Friday unprofitable, but also messed with their ability to extract themselves intact from the day's trading and remain neutral short interest change on Friday. Monday mornings can be notoriously volatile in a positive direction.
BTW, on an entirely different subject, the best clue we had that "Bored Elon Musk" was being written by Elon himself was the fact that Maye Musk was following Bored Elon Musk on Twitter and Maye follows very few accounts.
