It is Drew who is credited with the saying “He who sells what isn’t his’n, must buy it back or go to pris’n.”

For the cornerer, there is also the risk that rules will change when powerful people get in trouble. That was one of the things that broke the Hunt brothers’ attempted corner in silver back in 1980. The authorities made it almost impossible to bet on silver prices rising, and the Hunts went broke.

Now, from Germany we have a new version of the corner, using derivatives in a way that may have removed much of the risk for the people planning the corner.

Briefly, here are the relevant facts: Porsche, for some reason, wants to control Volkswagen, and has been building up its stake, thereby driving up the price. Hedge funds, figuring the share price would fall as soon as Porsche got control and stopped buying, sold a lot of VW shares short.

Then last weekend, Porsche revealed that it owned 42.6 percent of the stock, and had acquired options for another 31.5 percent. It said it wanted to go to 75 percent.

The result: instant short-squeeze. The German state of Lower Saxony owns a 20 percent stake in VW, which it said it would not sell. That left precious few shares available for anyone else. The shorts scrambled to cover, and the price leaped from about 200 euros to a high of over 1,000 euros. VW became the world’s most valuable company, if you believed that market price.

It appears that Porsche put one over on whoever wrote that option, or options. The options are said to be cash-settled, although we do not know much more about them than that. That means Porsche does not have to buy the shares  which it might have a lot of trouble paying for. Instead, at settlement it merely has to accept the cash difference between the market price and the price it has agreed to pay. The result could be tens of billions of euros in profits, without the headache of owning shares no one else wants to buy.